‘How good of you! Please take some money out of my purse which is lying about somewhere. You can get everything at the dairy opposite. I deal there. But I haven’t an account. I always pay, to save bills. I hate bills. Don’t you?’
There was no need to answer or to look for the purse. It lay on its side at the end of the chimneypiece yawning hungrily. Laura Mallory had never seen a larger or more conspicuously empty purse.
At the other end of the fireplace was a rose, complete but brown with age. It must have lain there a long time, for it was surrounded and covered by a fine dust. There was nothing else on the chimneypiece.
Laura stood in front of the purse to mask its emptiness, shut it with a snap and went to the door.
‘That’s all right. I shan’t be long.’
She bought milk, eggs, brown bread and a pot of honey.
‘Haven’t you come from the artist lady at Number 7?’
Laura gave a second’s thought before replying.
‘You mean Miss Berden? Yes I have.’
‘You might tell her that she owes us six shillings. I’ll give you the bill, to remind her.’
‘She has asked me to pay it, and I will pay for this too.’
‘Very good, Madam.’ His manner changed. He opened the door for her. Laura went out with a sigh.
Poor Ariadne! So brilliant, so tired and so ill, and without a halfpenny in her purse. Those blazing feverish eyes, that cavernous mouth, lacking teeth that she could not afford, that wild faded hair, and those fine artistic hands. Oh, it was terrible to think of her lying there helpless in that squalid Chelsea room neglected by the famous friends who had admired and praised her work in the nineties, when she was young. She had known them all; to her Oscar Wilde was poor Oscar, and when he died she had wept. ‘No one ever lived who was so kind.’ The small residue of that fascinating company now hardly remembered the existence of the child of promise, Ariadne. If one was not in Paris, one was not. How could they understand an artist living in England?
It was fantastic and absurd, she declared, but it had happened. And here she was translated from the Rue du Bac almost unconsciously to Chelsea. The reason for it floated in the air, enveloped in a cloud of surmise and hypothesis.
In fact it was quite simple. The offer of a regular job as art critic in a highbrow paper had brought her over, propelled by the urgent good wishes of her Paris friends, almost too urgent, she had sometimes thought since. The job evaporated almost at once and with it all her energy. She remained where she was, in the room she had rented at the top of an old house in a Chelsea street, letting the dust gather week by week between a charwoman’s visits, lying in her camp-bed most of the day, her pencil beside her, or poised for inspiration. Some evenings she would wrap herself in a long dark cape and dine in Soho, chattering cleverly in a high brittle voice, her thin blood warmed by plenty of vin ordinaire, which in those days was included in the menu.
Or she would go to a house on the Regent’s Canal, and drink strong coffee made straight into the cups, in a room that might have been a salon once, with noble windows, slim columns and walls enriched by vast rococo mirrors in which lustre chandeliers pendant from a moulded ceiling were reflected.
It was in this curiously romantic room that Laura and her husband Guy met Ariadne Berden. The early summer evening was turquoise blue through the open windows: the chandeliers, unlit, were prismatic in the light of a six-candle sconce on the chimneypiece. In the delicate shadow sat Ariadne and Clare Dobson, the owner of the mirrors, drinking coffee while a small silver kettle steamed sweetly but did not boil. Freshly ground coffee in a red enamelled box awaited the newcomers.
Mrs Dobson was in an interesting condition. If it was interesting to her, she kept it, as one is reserved about a hobby, not secret, for that was now impossible, but undiscussed. She remained what she must always have been, compact in mind and body, her stature not great, her intellect not formidable, but well nurtured by fastidious taste. Somewhere between thirty-five and forty, she had lately married a seafaring man ten years her junior, who loved her exceedingly (the child would lie in a cradle shaped like the King of Rome’s, gazing at rainbow crystals and sparkling lights).
That summer evening Ariadne was wearing a gloomy black lace hat which hung like a half-open umbrella over her pallid face. Its effect was as striking as it was meant to be, but when the Mallorys had recovered from its mystery, it was removed. It was impossible to carry on the most languid conversation beneath it, and as soon as Guy Mallory appeared among the mirrors and columns, she knew that this was no time for languor. She must sparkle. Off came the hat.
The introduction had been carefully planned. Clare had prepared Ariadne for a dazzling personality. He had great beauty, was extremely young, extremely witty, extremely fascinating. And Ariadne had interrupted:
‘Didn’t you say he was married too? Can you see her through the dazzle?’
Clare half shut her eyes at this.
‘Can’t you see her?’ had laughed Ariadne.
’Yes. But only just. She is there, very much so, and is likely to remain. She came here alone once, and yes — then outside the dazzle, she shone too, but faintly as though she were far away. I think she is too deeply in love to be much use to anyone else. But she can be amusing too. She has humour of course, or he wouldn’t be able to stand her. Perhaps that is what she is for. To be stood by him and to understand him. She can look beautiful too, but not always.’
Ariadne looking back for a moment to Paris, remembered that someone had said just that about herself — and she had liked it. To look always beautiful. That was rather monotonous, and he who had said it had murmured, ‘You sweet darling dirty tramp,’ and kissed her. This digression in Ariadne’s thoughts was clearly etched in her face. Clare observed it as she did most of her friend’s emotional vibrations. She had been long enough her friend to assess her virtues and her vices. She was also rather bitterly conscious that there were few friends left for Ariadne beside herself. She had known the Paris milieu, had thought it rotten, and Ariadne’s amour with the person who had found her not always beautiful was one of the darkest shadows on their friendship. She would be in sympathy always with love, but Ariadne, after treating reasonable admirers with prudish contempt, had fallen into the arms of an abominable creature of high intelligence, no morals, and the vivid imagination which was perhaps what she had been waiting for. He had the worst of reputations even among the Paris set. Ariadne lost caste, and when the affair ended after more than a year of heady intoxication, and with a certain amount of inspired work, she collapsed.
The dilemma was clearly recognised as a possible infliction on her fellow artists, who hastened her removal to London, and the job that had been arranged for her. By then Clare was established in London, had married, and knew that she must help Ariadne, whether her job lasted or not. She was not surprised when it failed. Ariadne, after feeble protest, allowed her to pay for the Chelsea room and the charwoman until something turned up.
This was the situation when Clare, always thoughtful and practical, asked Laura to a quiet little lunch, ‘just you and me’. She had added, referring to the first and only note she had had from Laura:
What a beautiful name yours is! Almost beautiful enough.
This was quite lost on Laura who had thought it must have something to do with Guy. That was her present state of mind.
The lunch was quite simply designed to fascinate Laura with the story of Ariadne. It was romantic enough. Flight from an aristocratic impoverished home in Ireland to become an artist, making a stir in Dublin, and then in the fantastic world of Paris in the ‘nineties, her friendship with the famous, and no divulging of the disastrous amour but stress on delicate health, poverty and genius.
Laura was enchanted by the prospect of seeing such a paragon, and Guy was glad to accept the invitation because he liked Clare Dobson and enjoyed her salon and its mirrors, though he was not particularly interested in Paris symbolists.
If, on the face of it, there might be a suspicion that Clare Dobson was shunning responsibility for Ariadne’s welfare, it was in a sense desperation that led her to draw Laura into the net. Here was the sailor husband on his way home, and the many duties and delights that awaited them both. The Ariadne preoccupation would have to be modified on his account. She knew too well that he was not enthusiastic about Ariadne. Why should he be? He did not see what exactly she signified, except that she was definitely opposed to him in every way.
When the Mallorys walked away from that meeting the evening was misted lavender with a half moon high in the sky. They went silently until they had crossed the canal, and Guy began:
‘Very queer.’
‘What is?’
‘That woman. She may be a genius. I know Clare Dobson thinks she is. But she is evidently under the spell.’
‘Under the spell! Is that what it is?’
‘That what it is’?’, then ‘Did you feel it?’
‘Something happened to me. There’s a fascination. She’s not at all beautiful really.’
‘Was once, perhaps. She’s a physical ruin. Must be quite thirty-five if not forty.’
Laura shivered, and he went on: ‘I liked her best in that floppy hat. Her eyes certainly did glow under it. Then she flung it off and showed us that scarecrow haggard face, long pointed nose — much too long, and mouth, much too small, and her voice — rushing up the scale. Her hair was probably quite a good red once,’ he added without pity.
‘It seemed to me rather like an aureole,’ she suggested tentatively.
‘Aureole be damned. She was playing up — for my benefit I suppose.’
‘I don’t see why — for yours —. Anyway it got me too,’ she added hastily, seeing a faint shadow cloud Guy’s vivid face. Sometimes she liked to tease him a little, but only a little. ‘I don’t see why’ she hoped was the lightest of badinage. But of course it was for his benefit, so obviously that she had ventured the silly challenge, with perhaps a slight hope that she also had been expected to benefit. She had not a trace of humility in her character. Only Guy could produce in her such mildness. He, with all his sensitiveness to other people’s moods, her own especially, and always being so unquestionably the centre of any company he was in, sometimes at some jesting criticism, would shut himself in his shell with a snap. He would not be teased or laughed at. Though he was by nature a practical joker, it seemed to her impossible that anyone should play a practical joke on him. Surely it was never done! Laughter with him rang to the roof. Laughter at him was never heard; not by him, at any rate.
The shadow passed on this occasion. He hummed lightly, looked up at the sky and suggested walking all the way home. Home was then a flat at the slummy end of Chelsea Embankment, close to what was once Cremorne. A dingy grey stucco building, originally a private house, was inhabited by a distinguished woman painter on the ground floor who had one evening rushed up the dark stairs in a rage at the sound of the Mallorys’ piano being noisily played by a musical friend of Guy’s. She had stopped short on the landing below when Laura appeared at the top of the stairs, holding a lighted candlestick in her hand. The painter was so taken aback by the apparition that she stood still, staring, and then withdrew with a muttered apology. Laura was quite conscious that she looked her best by the light of one candle (who does not?), but that was disappointingly her only meeting with the great painter, who was evidently shocked but not inspired. She painted landscapes —
Above the painter and under the Mallorys lived a literary couple. They were unobtrusively friendly, and had an unusual opportunity of being both, when Guy, stricken with scarlet fever and diphtheria was carried downstairs like a sack to a fever hospital, leaving Laura in sudden and startling loneliness, forbidden to communicate with anyone at all until matters were arranged by the family as to her fate.
She had stood looking out at the Turner view, which was one of the privileges of Number 28, through tears for which a sleepless night with Guy choking in her arms until daylight was partly responsible. The doctor came early and saw the rash; the ambulance did not arrive till evening and it was in a sunset that she was lost when there was a gentle knock at the door. The literary neighbour had heard something and seen the ambulance. She realised the solitary night which Laura must spend, and asked her to come down to dinner.
Laura explained that she was not allowed to see anyone.
‘I am dangerous. I have not had scarlet fever.’
This provoked no remark except, ‘Please come down in ten minutes. Everything will be ready by then.’
This was an order to be obeyed, and the comfort of those two good people on such a sad night she knew she would never forget. When Guy came back from hospital after six weeks, with an official order that he was not to be allowed to play with other children’s toys, one of the dubious problems of their marriage had arranged itself. The day after he was taken away Laura moved to the Mallory home in Kensington. This was an opportunity for a reluctant mother-in-law to study the wife Guy had married without warning. She already had no doubt that it might have been worse, judging by the looks and manners of Laura, and the fact that her family was well enough known to her and approved of. Still that was not enough to satisfy her as to Laura’s behaviour in having dared to marry Guy without leave.
An amicable relationship was established quite simply and unexpectedly on the first evening at the high red house in Pulham Square. Mrs Mallory insisted upon her ‘taking’ dinner in bed, where she should stay until the doctor declared her free of infection. A finely presented tray of what could only be adequately described as viands lay before Laura, with Mrs Mallory standing eagerly beside her.
‘A very light dinner. You must not eat anything heavy in bed. Just a little chicken, potatoes and sweet corn.’
‘Sweet corn? Is that what it is!’
Mrs Mallory was amazed that Laura did not know it.
‘We get it in tins from America. Guy is very fond of it.’
If there was faint reproach in this remark, Laura shyly admitted that they seldom ate properly in the flat.
‘We lead a restaurant life at present, except when we have dined with you. It is certainly delicious, this sweet corn.’
‘And I never gave it to you! We will have it next time you come here together. It is much better on the cob, but very difficult to get and to eat gracefully. We ate a great deal of it in Virginia.’
Mrs Mallory was a Virginian by birth.
‘Drink your wine. It will do you good. Then when you are safe from infection you will go every day with fruit and flowers to the hospital, in the brougham. It is rather a long way, and you must not tire yourself.’
Laura remembered how Guy had borrowed his mother’s brougham for the wedding, and Mrs Mallory met her look with a smile.
‘That was just like Guy, the rogue. I thought it was a lunch party.’
‘In a way it was,’ Laura murmured. ‘We had lunch afterwards in Soho with his best man. We drank champagne with the proprietor.’
A wistful look stole across Mrs Mallory’s face.
‘Ah. Champagne … We must all have some when Guy comes back.’ Laura felt that Mrs Mallory was not exactly resentful but hurt that the proprietor of a Soho restaurant should have been allowed to provide champagne for such an occasion, and not herself.
Sweet corn might, therefore, be said to have laid the foundation of a friendship between two highly strung women, who could easily have fallen out from the beginning and never made friends at all. This first encounter alone was a serious one, but it turned out to be effortless, and neither was trying to overwhelm or propitiate. Mrs Mallory had no illusions. Her worldly wisdom matched her glowing faith in ultimate good.
Laura was soon perfectly happy taking daily parcels to the hospital, getting baked letters from Guy, talking about Guy and being shown endless photographs of Guy from babyhood. Some of them were in his mother’s arms, revealing to her how beautiful Mrs Mallory had been twenty-four years ago, and how solemn was her baby. Once there was a small boy in a cotta.
‘Is that Guy too? Did he sing in a choir?
‘Not exactly. He helped at the altar sometimes.’
‘It is a wonderful picture of a boy, but I should never have recognised it as Guy.’
Mrs Mallory took it from her and after a glance at it put it away. She then produced Guy aged about five in a toy Lancer’s uniform.
‘This is the saddest of all,’ Laura exclaimed.
‘I gave him the uniform to cheer him up because I had to go away. He always hated that. It was a mistake of his nurse’s to have him photographed in it before I left, because he was in the depths of depression and would not smile or look cheerful or proud of his uniform.’
Laura nearly cried at this; a more forlorn expression she had never seen on any face.
‘He was a very sensitive little boy,’ was all his mother said, and Laura knew that she meant more than she said.
☙
It was as a poet that Laura had married Guy. She did not begin to wonder how they would live. When he came back from hospital he would write more poems, and as there was some money on both sides — more on his — she did not worry much, though they each had nothing but their family allowances to live on. And at any rate, she thought, she had escaped the possibility of marrying into the church, which her sisters had automatically and happily done. She had decided at an early age that this was what she could never do. She had even ‘gone on the stage’ to avoid the possibility, shocking a good many friends and relations but not her immediate family. Her father had actually encouraged her. He was a clergyman, but had great sympathy for her ambition though he did not realise it was chiefly an escape. It was unusual then for daughters of clergymen to become actresses. Legally stage people liked to consider themselves still rogues and vagabonds, but Mr Mildmay, her father, did not accept such distinctions, being no mean performer on the amateur stage himself. At the university he had been specially applauded in comic women’s parts. The ADC in those days did not invite actresses to take part in their performances.
Laura desired to see the world, to avoid church work that would as obviously be her fate as the curate who would inevitably fall in love with her. She had realised this at sixteen, had known enough of it all to realise that unless she took unusual steps she was doomed to a useful life, which she was convinced was not for her. She would never be useful. From both her parents she inherited gaiety of spirit. It had not been entirely quenched in them by lives devoted to good works. Yet she remembered the time when she was discontented and dreading the life that seemed to be inevitable, her mother had said:
‘My dear, you are like that tree.’
‘What tree?’
‘The plane tree. Look at it.’
The great plane tree, the pride of the Rectory garden, was flinging its splendid branches here and there, swelling and surging in graceful abandon to a strong laughing wind.
They had watched it together from the old nursery window, fascinated by its vagaries.
‘How lovely it is!’
‘So are you, and that is why I say that you must resist the idea which I know you have of being an actress. It is out of the question, you know, as I am sure father will always agree. Because you have been able to play parts well as an amateur, is no reason why you should have any success on the stage. The tree though it flings about quite madly, is deeply rooted as you are and can’t get away. Nor can you. At least — I know myself,’ she had suddenly changed her tone. ‘I never wanted the stage. Naturally that never occurred to me. But I was as gay as you are when a girl, and did not at all want the serious life that was my destiny. I’m thankful for it now, because I know what I might have been …’
‘Mother, darling, what might you have been?’ Laura was laughing now.
‘Never mind!’ She laughed too. ‘All I want to say is that you are lovely and your loveliness is not for the stage.’
Her mother died when she was seventeen and a year later she went on the stage. Because she did she met Guy before the stage had time to change her much.
Their marriage was another shock for everyone. It was secret because they both disliked weddings, and she could not see herself as a bride. Guy had been eating dinners throughout the brief courtship, and her natural assumption was that he would be called to the Bar if he did anything but write poetry.
And now, the hospital era well behind them, they reached their Chelsea flat after the long walk from Clare Dobson’s house.
There were a few letters in the letterbox. Guy lit another pipe and settled into the most comfortable chair. His legs had begun to hurt a little.
‘Nothing to do with scarlet fever,’ he assured her. ‘I always had cramps as a boy.’
She gave him his letters. There was one rather insignificant looking small business-shaped envelope with a crest on the flap.
‘This is from Cornwall.’
‘I’ve noticed a good many like that lately. What does it mean?’
‘Almost anything,’ he laughed.
‘Why a crest on such a mean little envelope?’
‘Just a fad.’
Then he read the letter, which was obviously very short.
‘How would you like to go and live in Cornwall?’
‘I should like it very much, I’m sure.’
‘This letter is from Father St John. I’ve told you something about him, haven’t I?
‘I think so. Isn’t he the priest who arrived at your country home wearing buckle shoes and carrying a whole turbot in a fish basket as a present to your mother?’
‘That’s the chap. It was his first visit, and he wasn’t very sure about the food. Read his letter.’
Dear Guy All right, one pound a week each. No luxuries or comforts full till autumn yours ever.
‘That looks as if we were going to stay with him.’
‘How quick you are! Does it sound all right?’
‘Pretty good. Can we afford it?’
‘Never ask that. It doesn’t enter into it at all. Remember that. It never does. The only question is, whether you would like it.’
‘Would you? That’s another question already answered, judging by this letter.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Supposing I said I wouldn’t like it. What would you do?
‘That doesn’t enter into it either. Because you will like it.’
‘Because I must, perhaps.’
‘Put it that way if you like. It’s all the same …’
‘You know best. And why are we going?’
‘Because I want to get out of London and be quiet and think. I’ve got something on my mind that I want to get settled. I won’t bother you with it now.’
‘Yes, you will. Is it the Church?’
‘Well, yes, it is an idea. I’ve always had it at the back of my mind.’
‘And now it’s on it. I know so little about you really, and I’m not much good at this sort of thing. But I can always be agreeable about it, I hope.’
‘That’s very nice of you. You won’t mind going to church rather often?’
‘I’m quite ready for that. There will be no novelty in it.’
‘You’ll probably find that there is at Helzephron.’
‘All the better for me. That would help a lot.’
‘Perhaps too much novelty. We shall see.’
‘Helzephron is a promising name. And I can’t be bored, with you about. I used to get bored with the inevitability of religious practices, if you know what I mean.’
‘That is a little bit pompously put for you. I guess that you are alluding to Protestant church-going generally.’
‘Yes, but I enjoyed High Anglican goings-on at St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, in early days.’
‘What on earth were you doing there?’
‘Staying with people I liked. I never missed High Mass all the time I was with them.’
‘We might have met. Though I preferred St Alban’s, Holborn, I was often at St Mary Magdalene’s.’
‘But on the other side of the aisle. Women were segregated then, you remember.’
‘Indeed I do. An excellent discipline.’
‘I generally sat on the inner edge of a row, not to see or lure the gentlemen opposite but because one could get a good view in the procession of a priest who looked like a young Savonarola. Once I heard him preach — and that was a pity.’
‘You enjoyed the ceremonial part of it all, I expect.’
‘I was enthralled. Who wouldn’t be? It was St Mary’s that lured me out of the Protestant church, but unfortunately into the wilderness. Not long afterwards I found myself in the Little Church Around the Corner in New York. It was there one could be married at any time of day or night without a licence.’
‘Really? And — er — was one?’
‘No, but was invited once, after midnight.’
‘Your past is full of mystery. At Helzephron you will get no excitements of either kind. No midnight nuptials and no processions and probably only a harmonium, if that.’
‘And when do we go?’
‘Father St John has his cousin and family there for the summer.’
‘Ah. So there’s breathing space,’ she mused.
‘You’re thinking of Ariadne.’
‘Partly, perhaps. She has asked me to visit her next week. Clare Dobson warned me that she might be in bed. She is always collapsing and has to rest.’
‘Don’t let her become a liability, anyway,’ said Guy, and began to think of other things.
☙
That first visit of Laura’s to Ariadne had been exciting enough. There was so much talk of Paris and the tragedy of not being there, and the misery of being in England and the stories of the famous people she had known, that Laura forgot the prospect of Cornwall, and it was not till she called on her a few days later that she revealed the prospect of their departure, and the future had become slightly obscured.
Ariadne was horrified.
‘A clergyman! But that is fearful. Surely you never expected anything like that from him, of all people. Anything but that. Didn’t he tell you he was religious before you married him?’
Laura admitted that there hadn’t been time to know everything about him. ‘We were only engaged for a fortnight.’
‘But you were married in church. Didn’t he show any signs then?’
‘No. He tried to put the ring on twice before he should. That’s all I remember. It’s not so much a question of his being religious. I expected it. But I don’t look forward to that sort of life. In fact I thought I had avoided it. I don’t feel I’m fit for a parson’s wife.’
‘I shouldn’t think you were.’ That was the end for the moment. Ariadne looked suddenly tired.
The walk to Ariadne was only too easy for Laura. Not so easy for Guy, whose leg seemed always stricken when a visit was in view.
‘A bone in me leg?’ Laura would remember her nurse’s excuse to avoid unnecessary effort.
‘Call it that if you like.’
But he had been once. He was too deeply depressed by artistic squalor to go again. A fisherman’s cottage — a shieling — yes, that indeed, in a dim frowst, and a strong reek of peat, shag, sweat and dripping dogs — he could spend hours happily in such an atmosphere. But this arid dusty discomfort, unreasonable and helpless, filled him with gloom. He saw no excuse for living like that. He sat on a slippery Windsor chair watching Ariadne pour weak tea into cracked china cups. Then his eyes had wandered to the chimneypiece, to the decayed rose, and his spirits fell. Symbolism — and how dusty! Silence enwrapped him. Laura saw the signs. He must never come again.
He had no objection to Ariadne at the flat. After all, she had to eat occasionally, and she was better as a guest than as a hostess. As long as she did not get excited and shrill she talked with great charm and understanding. Art was only lightly touched upon. Life was safer, and she warmed to general conversation that was never banal or tedious. The afternoon would often draw on into dusk, and Clare Dobson was sometimes there, to lead Ariadne into reminiscences of Paris and sometimes of childhood, less often of the Dublin era, at which she seemed to shy like a wild pony. Was there a mystery there or only boredom? Could Ariadne ever have enjoyed starvation for the sake of her art, for which in those days she was apparently ready to die? That was what Laura was asking herself after Ariadne had spent the last evening with them before their move to Cornwall.
‘What do you think about it?’ she asked Guy.
He looked out of the window. His slanting eyes narrowed.
Then:
‘It’s quite true about the starvation.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know a good deal more which you can read in this letter from Dublin.’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘An old friend. I asked him if he knew anything about her.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because I was interested. I am interested in her and her relation to us. She is either a fraud or genuine. I like to know. Of course she is not a fraud. You must read the letter. Then you will know all you need to know.’
A letter from Dublin
Dear Guy,
Your surprising letter comes well to me. I am just in the mood to write the story of Ariadne Berden, short though it may be from me, but you will find other sources no doubt. The good is that my father knew her, and he is still about and gives it at first hand.
She belonged to people in the West, a proud lot, known to neighbours far and wide as the Royal Family, not, mind you, because there was any boast of descent from Kings of Eire or any such cheap nonsense. It was, so I understand, simply that they kept inviolate the grand manner.
For them, you will laugh to hear, the present Royal Family was merely ‘these Guelphs’, to be dismissed as medieval ghosts of no importance whatever.
At the age of eighteen she escaped from home, cursed, when he found her gone, by a fox-hunting, mean-hearted father who had never unscrewed the top of his flask with any man, said the neighbours. His sisters, Melanie and Eulalie the old maids, and Grizelda, the youngest, were mouldering together with the estate — the slow progressive dilapidation of which was the liveliest and, I should think, the most absorbing activity in the domain.
The aunts, Eulalie and Melanie, denounced the truant girl, drew the cobwebs closer and forgot her. Their brother stormed and raved but made no effort to get her back. She had disgraced the family and there was an end. Aunt Grizelda who years ago had mourned a young husband, held her tongue. She took no steps. Her small independent income was essential to the needs of the enclosed family. Renegades could hope for nothing. This was made plain enough, when Ariadne’s note was found in the hall:
I am going away and will never come back. I am called.
Ariadne.
Naturally the old man suspected the worst, not having the wits to know that his daughter had been spending all her days in a studio attic doing something more than look out of the window. When she had gone, the attic studio was given for the first time a grand clearance of ‘Ariadne’s rubbish’, followed by a bonfire. The aunts were not allowed to see the holocaust superintended by the master. He had never heard the word symbolic. Ariadne’s vagaries were damned unpleasant, he thought, and conveyed as much to his sisters who knew even less than he did and accepted his verdict, I presume without suffering frustrated curiosity at all.
Ariadne took the best of her work with her, and began at the art school straight away. She also took some good trinkets and her quarter’s dress allowance, and, would you believe it, the dear simple lady engaged a poor woman to escort her to and from the school at half a crown a day, thinking it not proper for a female of quality to be seen out alone. This didn’t last long, nor did the trinkets, and she soon had as much escort as she needed among the other students. The art school hailed her as a genius and she soon got noticed by Dublin society. I don’t know how long this lasted. Not long, I fancy. My father knew her only when she had rid herself of all except her passion for art. She would die for it. This was the CALL, and she would answer it with her life, if necessary. She would starve for it. And she did. Funds were low and she was proud.
She rented a small half-furnished room and troubled no one. She lived for weeks on cocoa and bread alone, spending a penny a day. Being already of a delicate constitution, she wilted. She sank into the state when dreams become realities without pen being put to paper or brush to canvas.
She would go to the school, full of fervent inspiration. Then, faced by the tools that threatened hard work, she would find an excuse for abandoning them. Some urgent task unfinished at home … smiling gently she would fade away into her dreams that led to nothing. In her case there was no need for drugs; hunger and longing were enough.
The word went round, of course. The girl from the West was starving herself to death. Something should be done. It was known that she and her father were equally obdurate. There was no help there. A kind creature who was not artist or poet, offered her a room in his home and engaged her as companion to his delicate wife, this latter to save her pride. Surprisingly she accepted the offer, knowing that he would pay her fees at the school. But her pride was not saved, because she had not quite understood what being a companion involved. However decent the delicate wife was, and she was, I believe, an admirable lady, the position would not for long please one who had never known servitude and was anxious to die for her art.
She went back to cocoa and bread and the half-empty room, and her abstract fantasies, some of which, I believe, later on made a stir. But I have never seen them.
Then came a great poet to rescue her with a fine offer from a business friend. To draw advertisements … ‘Not so tiring as artistic creation, and would bring in a good sum meanwhile,’ he was suggesting when she withered him with elaborate thanks and showed him the door, assuring him that she would rather die than degrade her art to that extent. So the situation remained the same … She would rather die.
This great man was convinced that she had talent of a high order, but no sense. No inheritance of hard brain work — no inheritance, so far as he knew, of brains at all. Dying for your art’s foolish, if you accomplish nothing before dying. To reach a mystical state by cocoa and bread and dreams was emptiness. He himself had a long family history of scholars and workers behind him; he knew that even so art was difficult and long. He continued to interest himself in her welfare until she fell in love with a drunken scoundrel and lost whatever prestige she had by foolish behaviour which wasn’t really surprising in such an innocent virtuous girl who knew no better and got lost in the unexpected.
My father tells me of the portentous change that came over her and the effort made by certain good mystics who had befriended her, to help her when she seemed forsaken by everyone. This is the end of my story, for she left Dublin after being distressfully ill and cared for by those same mystics (and let me now confess that my father was one of them) and I understand, landed not long afterwards in Paris where they tell me she picked up again with that miserable scoundrel, but that doesn’t come into my story, and I’m glad of it. I know nothing more of her.
When will I be seeing you again? My compliments to your fortunate wife.
Yours ever,Terence