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Sh eee Ss a PERELLA BY THE SAME AUTHOR TDOLS PERELLA JAFFERY VIVIETTE SEPTIMUS DERELICTS THE USURPER STELLA MARIS WHERE LOVEIS THE ROUGH ROAD THE MOUNTEBANK THE RED PLANET THE WHITE DOVE FAR-AWAY STORIES THE GREAT PANDOLFO SIMON THE JESTER THE COMING OF AMOS THE TALE OF TRIONA A STUDY IN SHADOWS A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY THE WONDERFUL YEAR THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR THE FORTUNATE YOU THE BELOVED VAGABOND AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA THE GLORY OF CLEMENTIN2A THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL PERELLA BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE AUTHOR OF ‘“THE BELOVED VAGABOND,”” **THE GREAT PANDOLFO,”” ETC, NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1926 PART I PERELLA CHAPTER I Prretta Annaway found herself in Florence. She was one of those inconsiderable beings who find them- selves in places almost without an act of conscious voli- tion ; who drift, like an autumn leaf, from spot to spot, at the wind’s caprice. Not that there was anything autumnal about Perella. She was young—three-and- twenty—accepting with youth’s cheerful fatalism the will of any wind. Perella was pretty in a dark, Italian way. Her mainiicause for railing against Fortune was that there was so little of her. To herself she always seemed so small as to pass unperceived in a vast world. In a crowd she could see nothing but the lower part of the shoulder-blades of those in front of her. Wherefore she hated crowds. Her physical dislike had a moral correlation. She had grown up with a sense of her en- tire insignificance in the cosmic scheme. Of her faded Italian mother she retained only child- ish memories. 'The photograph which she always car- ried about with her revealed a spiritual, frightened thing in an old-fashioned dress, who seemed to wonder why she was alive in a flabbergasting world. Some- times, in moments of depression, she would kiss the pho- tograph in sentimental sympathy. Never could she reconcile her parents one with the other. How had they come together? Her inexperience of life was a barred door to the solution of the question. For her fa- ther, John Annaway, still alive—robustiously alive— was as remote from this terrified slip of a mother as an ogre froma fairy. Ofcourse she adored him. He had 1 2 PERELLA brought her up in a fashion of his own, and he stood in her serious eyes as a sort of rapscallion Jove. It never occurred to her that the daughter of the starving poet in Rome had, as inamorata and wife, been carried away by those very vividly male qualities that had bound herself as a daughter to the hairy and joyous pagan that was her father. Perella sat in her little back room of the Pension Toselli on the Lungarno Torrigiani, and looked out on uninspiring chimney-pots, and grey desolate sky from which fell stern, pitiless rain. There is no gentle rain in Florence. She had just come im after her day’s work at the Uffizi, and was very wet and cold and miserable. The famously advertised central-heating of the Pension Toselli did not extend to the tiny back bedreoms. A radiator of three tepid pipes would prob- ably pretend to warm the stuffy salon, where the old trouts (such was Perella’s maiden jargon) of Anglo- Saxonia sought to exhilarate their fishy blood with weak tea and strong scandal; but that wouldn’t dry her soaked shoes and wet stockings which lay forlornly on the floor awaiting the slatternly nondescript maid who was far too busy to take notice of back bedroom bells. . . . A dismal trickle from the poor little wet umbrella crept sinuously across the uncarpeted floor. Half-unclothed, barefoot, Perella looked anxiously at her hat. There was only a little soaked inch at the back. Perhaps it wouldn’t show, after all. She sighed. Hats were so dreadfully expensive, and, lured by the morning’s sunshine, she had put on her best. Why she had selected her newest Sunday-go-to- meeting hat just to go to her daily routine of copymg the Franciabigio, she didn’t know. It was silly of her. But the early spring had sung a lilting song, and she had obeyed a blind instinct. PERELLA 3 The stain would pass. She refused to contemplate heartbreak. Luckily the ribbon was untouched. She put the vanity tenderly on the deal chest of drawers. Her legs and feet were frozen. She debated for a mo- ment. Should she reattire herself in dry clothes and descend to tea among the old trouts who worried her because she was a painter, questioned her curiously be- cause she was the daughter of a well-known journalist, and criticized her clammily because she was young and possibly good-looking, or should she sacrifice the tea which she wanted, and frankly go to bed and stay there in warmth until the hour came for the farinaceous and oleaginous evening meal? She decided on bed. After all, for the moment, she was mistress of her destiny. So, sticking her cold little feet into the arms of a wool- len sweater, and dragging the body of it as far as it would go up her legs, she snuggled into bed, and gave herself up to philosophic reflection. In ten minutes she was as warm and as physically content as a stray kitten curled up before a casual fireside. Beyond this easy comfort she did not look. She had lived all her young life in cold back bedrooms, and been nourished on haphazard meals. When her father was busy on his copy, the delivery of which he ever put off to the last moment, he disregarded food. When he was idle, he preferred drink. She had lived in a series of poky flats in West Kensington, Putney, Battersea—one scarcely distinguishable from the other. Her father naturally had the best bedroom; one of the two reception rooms served as his study, the other as dining- and drawing-room; the spare bedroom at the back—always at the back, either overshadowed by the buildings on the other side of the dull courtyard or commanding a view of forests of chimney-pots—had been assigned to Perella. . . . She had been accus- 4 PERELLA tomed from childhood to look after herself; mainly through instinct of self-preservation. If she felt hun- gry she would go into the tiny kitchen and beg the un- kempt servant to cook something for her, wherefore her main fare had consisted of kippers and bacon and tea. To look after her great, hairy, untidy father had been an impossibility. So long as his den was left un- dusted, his bed made for the night, and his morning re- pose held sacred, he scorned domestic ministrations. He spent most of his life at his clubs; one, when he was more or less respectably dressed and attuned to social amenities, being the Savage; the other (his favourite) a dissolute den cynically styled the “Fuddlers.” He was a man who cut himself adrift from responsibility. While Perella was a small girl, he gave her over to the care of a poor-spirited and impecunious cousin who came daily to the flat of the moment and gave the child elementary instruction. Later, when the conscientious Mentor recommended boarding-school, he bade her make inquiries. She reported. ‘The fees demanded filled him with a sense of outrage. Good God! It would mean at least a couple more columns a week! He couldn’t do it. Education? So long as a child knew how to read a book, it could educate itself, and wasn’t his study crammed from ceiling to floor with books? What more was necessary? Of course she could have the run of his library while he wasn’t there, so long as she didn’t make a mess of the place... . And so was Perella educated. .. . Now and then his cronies came in to smoke pipes and drink whisky, eat bread and cheese and cold ham, and talk. ‘They were writing men, out-at-elbow painters, or black and white artists; now and then stray musi- cians who would thump out strange harmonies on the battered old cottage piano. Perella would sit for an PERELLA 5 hour or two and listen to the talk or the music, and regard them as demi-gods grouped around the feet of her Olympian sire, which was more or less true. With one or two satyr-like exceptions they were all younger men, he having fallen out of the race of his own gener- ation. Anyhow, among them Perella felt herself the most infinitesimal of mortal atoms. She made mental notes of the books they talked about, and, having hunted them up in her father’s study, read as much of them as she could understand. Then, one evening, a young man from Chelsea took up a girlish sketch or two which she had left lying about the careless room. “Hullo, Annaway! Who did these? Perella?” He took them over to the bearded Jove. Perella wished herself less than an atom, an invisible electron. ‘Yes, I suppose so,” said her father casually. “They’re jolly good,” said the young man from Chelsea. He bored the Olympian dreadfully, but he set every nerve throbbing in Perella’s small body. “Of course she can go to your rotten Art school if she likes,” said her father at last. ‘“‘There’s only the bridge to cross.” This was the Battersea flat. “What about it, old thing?” “Oh!” breathed Perella. And that was the end, or rather, the beginning of it. She became an Art student in Chelsea, and, for the first time in her life mingled with youth of her own age... . Then, when she was twenty-one, all kinds of things hap- pened. First, her aunt Euphemia, a maiden lady whom she had seen but transiently and at long intervals, and who had renounced for many years John Annaway and all his works, died, and left her sixty pounds a year. Secondly, she sold some drawings. Thirdly, 6 PERELLA she found herself in Paris, she scarce knew how, with another girl. Fourthly, when she returned to the par- ental flat, she found installed there a lady who made no pretence of being her adopted sister. “My dear,” said the Jovian reprobate, “I’m grow- ing old and infirm’”—he was on the sunny side of fifty —‘“and I need someone to look after me during my declining years. You have lived among the riff-raft across the river, and, to my knowledge, you have ac- cepted the hospitality of ménages that it pleases the world to call irregular. So it would be hypocritical of you to be shocked. . . . Of course, my dear, my home, small as it is, is always yours; but I’m sure you would like to be independent. And why shouldn’t you? You have your own little fortune. You’re selling pic- tures like hot cakes. You have youth, ambition, hope. My God, how I envy you!” He drank half a tumbler of whisky and soda, and, in accents of deep emotion, repeated: ‘““How I envy you!” Upon which he gave her his blessing and a bewilder- ing cheque for fifty pounds, and smiled her out into the wide world. Over these things did Perella ponder as she lay thaw- ing in bed in Florence. That morning she had received one of her father’s rare letters which brought back the past, so near in actual time, and yet so pathetically re- mote. He had said: “Always thinking, my dear child, of your welfare, I have written to my old friend, Professor Gayton—the Silvester Gayton, you know—to ask him to do something for you. He once was very kind to me—so why shouldn’t he be kind to your” PERELLA 7 During her two or three years’ solitary drifting, she had learned something about the world, and the queer ways of the men and women that peopled it. Her Jo- vian sire no longer dwelt on Olympus. She knew him for what he was—a brilliant man, sodden with drink and self-indulgence, only whipped out of sloth by the ne- cessity of earning the minimum livelihood adequate to his tastes. . . . The lady was still there, guiding the feeble footsteps of forty-nine. . . . Perella, although she knew that the Winstanleys and the Borrowdailes— good friends of hers—were not married, winced at the thought of the lady. As a matter of fact, as far as a diminutive waif can hate, she hated the lady. She knew not why; for, apparently, from all reports, she was a decent soul who had rescued him from the fumes of the Fuddlers’ Club. But why didn’t he marry her? Some Puritan atavism, exemplified by the late Aunt Euphemia, rebelled against the situation. Stull, she couldn’t help adoring him, his smiling ge- niality, his imperturbable good-nature, his splendour of intellect when he was at his best, his giant’s baby- helplessness, ever fascinating to woman; all his quali- ties, as she thought of them, warmed her heart. And then this trouble to which he had put himself—to write to Professor Gayton. . . . Yes, she adored him in spite of everything. Im spite, too, of the introduction to Professor Gayton. She had seen pictures of Profes- sors in the comic papers, and once a prototype had visited the flat in Battersea. The latter (like the pic- tures) was stuffy and snuffy, and wore a white beard reaching down to his middle. She was very young, ten years old, at the time, and he had kissed her; but the smell of snuff and stale white beard had lingered 8 PERELLA in her memory. If he had worn a full growth, strong and ruddy, like her father, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the Professor had a long, soiled, clean-shaven upper lip, which seemed to make a world of difference. She sighed, having little use for white-bearded professors. Then, the reflection that nowadays she was too mature for casual oscularity brought consolation, and she gur- gled a little comfortable laugh. The world was not a bad place, after all. Rosenstein, the dealer in the Rue Bonaparte, had promised her two thousand francs for a copy of the Madonna del Pozzo on which she was now engaged, if it came up to the sample of her work at the Louvre. Perhaps, after all, that was why she found herself in Florence. Payment in thousands conveyed splendid suggestion. . . . She felt quite warm now. Sweater arms were the only wear for cold toes. . . - Had she got the little St. John’s thighs all right? Of course in Franciabigio’s original picture they were hopelessly out of drawing. Wouldn’t the accurate re- production rather glare in the copy? On the other hand, to put the Immortal Master right—the easiest thing in the world to do—would not only be an act of unpardonable presumption, but might put the whole of the picture wrong. ‘The Infant, though, was lovely. She thought she had got Him—especially that little adorable bit where the Madonna’s hands pressed into the tender baby flesh . . . and the sweet little puckers in the legs. . . . Two thousand lire! She could af- ford a couple of pairs of silk stockings, and another best hat if this one was ruined, and she could buy “A Wan- derer in Florence.” The clatter of a cracked gong dimly heard from far below aroused her from vagrant musing. Seven o’clock — already? She rose, made her ablutions in the fitted wash-basin—running-water, hot and cold, in every PERELLA 9 room, as per advertisement—shrinking a little from the ice-cold stream that poured out of the hot tap, put her- self into some sort of flimsy semblance of an evening frock—she had but two, one faded mauve, the other yellowed cream; she chose the mauve—and hurried down three flights of stairs to the salon, where the in- mates assembled before dinner. It was a stark, moth-eaten room, and the guests had the appearance of being somewhat the worse for wear, and of braving it out with forlorn perkiness. The two Miss Brabazons had lived there for fifteen years. They were the authorities on Florentine History, To- pography and Art. It was considered a breach of eti- quette to contradict them. 'The Rev. Edward Grewson and his wife were five-year-old pillars of the establish- ment. He was squat and asthmatic, and perspired freely in cold weather ; he also did an occasional clerical turn at Holy Trinity or St. Mark’s, being an amiable and much respected man. Mr. Enderby, a sprightly young man from Cook’s, also regarded himself as a pillar. The others were birds more or less of passage. Two or three American girls in feverish chase after culture, and a vague Rumanian widow; also a young English garden-city honeymoon couple, both sandy- haired, with whom Perella had formed a timid acquaint- ance. The last seemed to spend their days tramping over Tuscany, bare-headed, with weird luggage strapped to their backs. The young man wore his col- lar outside his jacket, the lady conformed so far to con- vention as to attire herself for the evening in a shape- less green garment with holes cut for head and arms. They had inscribed their names on the register as Mr. and Mrs. Basil Merrywether. They greeted Perella as she shyly entered. They had walked to Fiesole and back. 10 PERELLA ‘“‘A glorious excursion,” said he. “And the lovely cathedral. And the Roman Thea- tre. Too fascinating for words,” said she. “You know it, of course?” Perella sighed. There was so much in Florence for her yet to see, and the copying of the picture took up so much of her time. She looked at the privileged couple in admiration. “You don’t mean to say you went all the way up there in this pouring rain?” “We did,” said Basil Merrywether triumphantly. “It was splendid—so fresh, so exhilarating.” Said Mr. Grewson, who was standing by: “You believe then in always taking the rain of the country?” Perella caught a waggish eye, and laughed. Mrs. Merrywether looked at him blankly. ““My husband’s holiday is limited, and we must see as much as we can, rain or fine.” Mr. Grewson mopped his forehead. ‘Quite so, quite so, my dear lady. We must make the best of things. Otherwise what would be the function of Divine Provi- dence?” ‘“That’s very true,” she acquiesced. ‘“‘Besides, I like the rain,” her husband declared. “It sets the atmosphere of the landscape just as often as the sunshine. To see everything in the sunshine is to go away with—well, not false, but unrectified impressions. Impressions in life are the things that matter.” “My husband,” said Mrs. Merrywether, by way of supplement, “has written a play from that point of view. It’s going to be produced when he gets back at our new theatre at Goldstead Park.” Perella eyed her with awe. “T didn’t know Mr. Merrywether was a dramatist.” 99 PERELLA 11 “T’m not,” he replied heartily. “I wish to goodness I were! Ive got to toil and moil at sordid things all day long. But my nights belong to myself, and then I try to express myself, as my wife says, impressionistically.” “T’ve got to encourage him, you see,” said Mrs. Mer- rywether. “An artist’s wife is no wife unless she’s pre- pared to make sacrifices.” Mr. Grewson mopped his forehead again, and, not daring, this time, to let Perella catch his waggish eye, turned away to the elder Miss Brabazon. Madame Toselli, dark, plump, smiling, but with deep and anxious perpendicular lines between her brows, entered the room. Why an Englishwoman who had married an Italian (now defunct) should be addressed as “Madame,” no one knew. Mr. Grewson, always humoristic, would whisper that it was because she once had an aunt who had divorced a Portuguese Admiral. It is true that she always spoke of “my uncle, the Ad- miral,” with an air that compelled respect. Her lips smiled greetings, but her eyes were busy counting heads. The perpendicular lines deepened. She turned suddenly and went out of the room, returning presently on the stroke of the cracked gong. Dinner was served. The company drifted into the bleak dining-room, where the old-fashioned custom of the long common table was retained. Punctuality was the es- sence of economic service. A guest who arrived late must forfeit the courses he had missed. If he strolled in when the meal was over, he had no meal. Median and Persian were the laws of the Pension Toselli. Madame Toselli took her place at the end of the long table flanked by its double row of yellow backed cane chairs, and meagrely adorned by a few vases of artifi- cial flowers set on the central line. The old custom of seniority prevailed. The Misses Brabazon sat one on 12 . PERELLA each side of the hostess. Then came the Grewsons. And so in order. Perella, the last comer, stole into her chair at the very end. Her neighbour was a deaf old — lady who, according to Madame Tselli’s reiterated as- surances, belonged to a Swiss noble family, but ate spaghetti in the fresh and joyous way in which a certain nation recently tried to wage war. As Perella couldn’t talk Swiss, and couldn’t have been heard even if she did, she let her neighbour eat her food in (figurative) silence, and retired into the funny world of her own thoughts and sensations. Her opposite neighbours across the narrow table were an elderly Italian couple, who disregarded the existence of the other alien guests. Thus, it will be seen that, up to the present, Perella’s meals had been rather lacking in convivial charm. But on this evening, when she sat down beside the deaf old lady, she noticed a vacant place below her, whose set-out for a new-comer was made startlingly con- spicuous by a clean, fan-wise folded napkin stuck in a tumbler. Her own napkin wore the reproachful dingi- ness of days. She felt a mild thrill of excitement. She was no longer the last new girl at this elderly sort of boarding-school. Some newer girl was coming. She hoped she would be English and nice and companion- able. She dreamed of suave possibilities, and her thin soup was swept away before she had half finished it; whereupon she resolved to concentrate her mind on the ravigiolt which was beginning to be handed round at the far-off head of the table. Then the door opened. In came a careless young man in a dinner-jacket—solus mortaliwm, alone thus vested of men who were dining there—who, after stand- ing for a disconcerted moment, strolled up to Madame Toselli. Madame Toselli looked up at him rebukingly, and pointed down the room. He smiled and nodded, PERELLA 13 advanced, and, taking his place beside Perella, unfolded his fan-folded napkin with the air of one accustomed to clean and freshly folded napkins at every meal of his life. Before sitting down, however, he met the stony Italian stare of his opposite neighbours, and made them an easy bow, to which they responded punctiliously. To Perella, too, he made the faintest little suggestion of a salutation. Then, while waiting for the slowly advancing dish, he scanned the table in a humorous glance. He was a clean-run, brown-haired, blue-eyed youth, who gave Perella a queer magnetic sensation of pulsat- ing life. The ravigioli was served; she wondered whether he would speak to her. She noticed that he ate his ravigioli with a very healthy appetite. Sud- denly he said to her: “To you happen to be English?” She smiled shyly. “Yes, of course.” “Why of course? By the look of you, you might be a gipsy or anything.” She coloured. He went on: “What are you doing here?” “T’m living here,” said Perella. “Since when?” “T came here a week ago.” “None of these people are your friends?” “Oh, no,” said Perella truthfully. “Then look at them,” said the young man with an engaging smile. ‘Cast your eye up and down them. Did you ever see such a job lot of fish in your life?” CHAPTER II Durine the course of her Art studies in Chelsea and that of her driftings in London and Paris, Perella had come across many young men—clean, dirty, vehement and modest. With none of them, however, had she been on terms of comradeship, lingering, as she was, under John Annaway’s Olympian spell. She trans- lated the masculine into terms of her father, and shrank, in a shy woodland way, from a dominant sex. For which reason, self-centred young men, accustomed to facile friendship with unreserved young women, passed her by as a young female of no account. Some- times, in half-hours of poetic meditation, she envied the bolder of her sisters who, with the splendid air of god- desses conferring favours, went alone with young men to tea-shops, cinemas and theatres. She pictured to herself the thrilling experience. But, on awaking to prosaic life, she knew that these were crazy dreams, and that none of her men acquaintances would be bored with her for more than five minutes at a time. So she shrugged her little shoulders and went her little lonely way. The easy young man with the irreverent outlook, sitting next to her at table, was a revelation. He talked to her not out of perfunctory politeness, but because he appeared to enjoy her company. He had the manners of a prince travelling incognito, and gave her the feeling that he found her of birth so kindred as to include her in his sphere of remoteness from the other guests of the Pension. “Tt’s all very well to say you’re living here,” he re- marked, “but what are you doing here save living?” 14 PERELLA 15 “Trying to earn it,” replied Perella audaciously. He laughed. “I wish you’d tell me how to do it. That’s what I’ve come for. What do you do?” “I’m a copyist.” “Painter? Yes? How great! Splendid! I’ve come to paint or draw, or do something, I don’t quite know what. You'll put me right. Ill stay here for ever and sit at your feet. Now that I come to look at you, you have the painter’s face—the wide-set eyes, you know. I’m sort of half-trained as an architect. If it was all art, designing cathedrals and mausoleums and casinos, I’d love it. But nowadays it’s a matter of stresses and strains and ferro-concrete and drainage systems and sticking in hot-water pipes so that a cook can wash up greasy dishes without any trouble. You don’t call that art, do you?” “It’s all very necessary,” said Perella. “Then let’s leave it in the hands of the Necessarians.” *“Why not be one?” “Can't,” said the young man. “I went into Arm- strong’s office, you know—Halliday Armstrong, R.A. Thought I was going to help him in International Com- petitions, Designs for Palaces in Siam and Sweden, all pediments and pinnacles—that’s just a pretty figure of speech, because they don’t gee together.” Perella smiled. “But you see what I mean. I wanted to be an artist, and the last job the beastly fellow put me on to was the working drawings of the sub-basement of a Monster Hotel. Can you imagine it? Every con- ceivable horrible pipe, tube, furnace, boiler, ventilating shaft, hygienic cockroach pen. ...I went to the Great One in modest expostulation. I was born to higher things. He had the nerve to say—he’s one of those nasty, precise people with a squeaky voice: ‘Young man, you were born to do that which is good 16 PERELLA for your soul. Clear out and go back to your work.’ ” “And you cleared?” asked Perella, vastly enter- tained. “Eventually. I couldn’t stick it. I put it to you, as a practical, sensible girl, quivering, at the same time, like me, with the sense of beauty, the beauty of line and colour, I put it to you—could you have stuck it?” Never had man made to her an appeal so personal as this frank and mirthful youth. She coloured adorably, and laughter shone in her eyes. “So long as I didn’t have to draw the cockroaches.” He laughed again at this mild jest, helped himself to the veal which, after tasting, he declared to be the sweated calf, the right portion for prodigals. She asked him when he had arrived. ‘That very evening, he said. He had put in a day or two at Milan to see the Cathedral and the Brera. Being broke to the wide, he explained in his lucid English, he had asked a Flor- entine resident to recommend him a hole where he could eat and sleep at minimum expense. The friend had paved his way to the Pension Toselli. “When I came to the dining-room, my first impulse was to bolt like a rabbit who finds himself in a den of foxes, but you make all the difference. Now that we’re on intimate terms, do tell me your name. Mine’s Blake —Anthony Blake.” ‘ “Miss Annaway,” she replied primly. “Annaway?” He flicked association-seeking fingers. “Anything to do with the John Annaway who writes that column in the Sunday-what-d’ye-call it?” *““He’s my father.” He radiated delight. “How splendid to know all about you at once! What’s your Christian name? I’ve told you mine.” “It’s rather odd. Perella.” | PERELLA 17 “Odd? It’s unique. You must be the only Perella in the world.” With such stimulating discourse did he hold her at- tention to the end of the meal. She learned odds and ends of his ingenuous history. Harrow had prepared him for Cambridge, and Cambridge had prepared him for the perfect enjoyment of hedonistic existence. His father, a partner in the old-established firm of Blake, Bislett and Smith, stockbrokers, had reserved a seat for him in the decorous office. He described it to Perella, in an exaggerated way, as a place of horror, nerve- racking with the rattle of typewriters, the clicking of tapes, the clang of telephones, the epicene roarings of distant bulls and bears; the whole filthy place a tangle of unintelligible arithmetic. With perfect filial cour- tesy, of course, he had turned it down. The best day’s work, he said, that he had ever done in his life. At this point of his story, dinner being over, Madame Toselli rose, and the company filed out of the dining- room, back to the moth-eaten salon. On the threshold he apostrophized the Deity and seized Perella’s wrist. “T can’t stand it. I should go mad. What do they do? ‘Sit and hear each other groan’ like the gentle- men in Keats? What do you do?” “T get into a corner and read up Florence for an hour, and then I go to bed,” said Perella. “Or else I listen to Mr. Grewson talk.” “But suppose you want to talk yourself?” Perella blinked at the startling suggestion. “T don’t,” she murmured. “But I do,” he declared. “I love talking.” “Well, go in and try,” she said, her heart ever so little a-flutter. ‘“They’ll love to listen to you.” “T like to choose my audience,” he said. “I want to 18 PERELLA go on talking to you. Where the Hades can I do it?” “Here,” said Perella helplessly. He shivered. “In this awful draught? Isn’t there some dreadful, deserted Picture Palace in the town where one can gossip in comparative warmth?” From fluttering, her heart progressed to beating hard. The crazy dream was coming true. A young man—and, to boot, a young man of elegant accomplish- ment and fascination—was for taking her out, all by herself, to the Cinema. Hitherto, on male-escorted picture jaunts, she had been dragged as a third party, damping undesirable ardour. He misunderstood her blushing effort to collect her confused wits. ‘“Won’t you come with me? Really I’m quite harm- less. Or are you afraid that, when you get back into the Aquarium, the dreadful fishes will tear you to bits?” “Oh, they don’t matter !”’ said Perella. “What does then?” “Nothing,” said Perella. “Come along, then. We’ll hat and coat ourselves and meet at the bottom of the stairs.” They met. She had put on her one smart coat over her flimsy evening frock—it was very thin—and her one little bit of fur round her neck, and the precious hat on which the rain-stain (oh, beneficent Providence!) no longer showed. He was smoking a cigarette in the dim hall. She drew a quick breath. “Oh, I haven’t kept you waiting?” He took out his watch and consulted it by the dim light. ‘Thirty-five seconds,” he said. The rain had ceased, and given place to a night of scudding cloud and watery half-moon and a vapoury air through which Florence across the river rose lu- minously fantastic. They walked up the quiet Lun- PERELLA 19 garno Torrigiani and the Via de Bardi, Anthony Blake talking into enchanted ears. But once on the Ponte Vecchio, conversation, save in confidential staccato, be- came impossible. As one inured to the conduct of dam- sels, he tucked his hand under her arm, and guided her through the welter of the crowd that, from time im- memorial, has ever found its vagrant yet sheltered pleasure in the public streets. Horse and motor traf- fic divided it perpetually, as though ploughing a way through dry sand; and, as perpetually, the sand of humans closed in again, unconscious of disturbance. “Isn’t it fascinating?” he said, with a little squeeze of her arm. ‘‘Must have been just like this when Savona- rola was a boy. I’ve often heard of it—never seen it. I wonder where we’re going to?” “Don’t you know your way?” “Lord, no! Didn’t I tell you I struck the ike only two hours ago? I’m a babe in your hands, cry- ing for a picture-palace with nobody in it.” “If we go straight on and follow that tram,” she said, with a new sense of authority, “we'll come to the Piazza di Vittorio Emanuele, where all the cinemas and things are. That’s modern; but if you’d like to go a little bit out of your way, down this street here, you may see something quite as good as a cinema.” “Nice and warm and gossipy?” She chuckled happily. ‘“‘You’ll see.” The short Vacchereccia brought them into the com- paratively quiet Piazza della Signoria. The moon, es- caping from tormenting cloud, spread sombre majesty over the dimly lit expanse of wonder. ‘The young man, Anthony Blake, dropped the girl’s arm, and _ stood agape. There, in the mysterious light, loomed the grim, gigantic, heavily machicolated and battlemented mass of the Palazzo Vecchio, surmounted by its grim machi- 20 PERELLA colated and battlemented campanile. There in shadow gleamed, mysterious and compelling, the fountained Neptune of Michael Angelo. A turn, and full and serene in the moonlight stood the cloister of the Lanzi, delicate-coloured, round-arched, spandrel-decorated, with its frieze of proud yet gracious heraldry; and, be- low, the baffling mystery of its immortal dwellers in bronze and stone. “Of course you can’t see it now, but that’s the Per- seus of Benvenuto.” His hand sought hers, and, like fairy-tale children im an Enchanted Castle, they wandered round the square in awed silence. After a while he said: “Now we’re at it, let us see it all.” *“*All what?” “*Florence.” “It would take a year at least.” “We'll do it. You and I together,” he said. “But let us see all we can to-night. 3 She felt herself growing more audacious every min- ute. “That wouldn’t be fair to Florence. It’s a bit trip- pery, isn’t it?” VEPs ie tripper! on He smote his chest in protestation. “That’s why. You’re not. You can afford to see it bit by bit. I rushed around when I first arrived, and I couldn’t sleep for two nights. Everything went round and round, and got hopelessly mixed up. But perhaps you’ve got a stronger head.” They came out into a patch of watery moonlight, and he became aware of her little pale face. “I’ve got a stronger body, and I’m a selfish brute. You’ve been standing up all day in some frowsty place before a horrid easel, and you’re dead tired.” PERELLA 21 She protested valiantly that exercise was the one thing in the world she needed; that the grounds of her counsel had been purely exsthetic. Why not keep this one wonderful impression, instead of muddling it up with a hundred others? “Perella,” said he, “I adopt you as my artistic con- science. We will now take a cab to the ghastly warm Palace of our dreams.” But cab she refused. Was he a millionaire to take cabs, on a moment’s whim, to drive but a few yards? Said he: “'To-night I feel the Lord of the Earth!” She gave him a little upward, fleeting glance. The proclamation was an echo of her father in his uplifted moments. But these moments had been ever uplifted by spirituous liquors, whereas her companion had drunk nothing but the thinnest of red wine, and spar- ingly, because it was not over-alluring. She became half conscious of a quick blacking out, as on a film, breaking the sequence of high romance. Her practical little mind worked swiftly. Lords of the Earth dwelt in Grand Hotels, not Pensions Toselli. Besides, had he not confessed to being broke to the wide, and to seeking a modest hole? She must check this magnifi- cent but spendthrift boy on the road to ruin. “We walk, or I don’t come,” she declared. “So long as you come,” he said, “I’ll crawl on all fours.” She laughed, and the film of romance flashed out again. 'They set forth on their quest of comfort. On their way they came to the half-arch of the Or San Michele. He paused, looked on either side at the phan- tasmagoria of sculpture in the confused light. “You must blindfold me, or I’ll have no further use for you as a conscience.” 22 PERELLA Again she laughed. “I’m so glad you feel like that about it. Beauty is something, isn’t it? Just Beauty?” “Tt’s everything,” he proclaimed. ‘All these people at the Pension talk of Florence as if it were a collection of postage-stamps.” “My dear Conscience,” he said, joming her after a forced separation by half a dozen free young Floren- tines, “more than ever do I desire to make your better acquaintance.” Around the approaches to the great Piazza the crowd grew thicker. It was mainly composed of men; but of men, not hurrying feverishly m pursuit of tram-cars, girls, wives, homes, dog-dealers, and other pleasures, but standing, lounging, strolling a step or two and then returning; and talking, talking, smoking, spitting, tak- ing their curious jostled ease, and, as casually individu- alistic as their ancestors, indifferent to the convenience of would-be passing man, woman, or child. Only the hoot of a car, or the crack of a cabman’s whip, and the familiar curse on his tongue, caused the resentful move- ment of self-preservation. They emerged into the Piazza di Vittorio Emanuele, once the most picturesque, squalid, ancient, and fasci- nating network of fever- and assassin-haunted slums in Europe, but now a vast square blazing with electric light; and surrounded by those square blocks of com- mercial buildings put up by Italian engineer-architects which make one edile say to another: ‘‘We are citizens of no mean city.” And there are electrically lighted shop-fronts, and glittering open-air cafés, and illumi- nated, multi-coloured entrances to Picture Palaces. And in the middle of it, on a monstrous plinth on a prancing horse, sits King Victor Emanuel, obviously agreeing with the ediles. PERELLA 23 “You’re quite right,” said Anthony Blake. “We've done the only thing possible. This is the acid, or what- ever it is, that fixes the photographic plate—the other Piazza, you know.” “Of course I know,” said Perella. They entered the cinema portal—no door was ever equipped with its gorgeousness. He took tickets. They passed through turnstiles, and mounted carpeted stairs, and a torch-equipped attendant took them through a curtained doorway into the high tier of a dim amphitheatre. ‘The benches were sparsely occupied. Perella whispered reproachfully : “These are the most expensive seats.” “Tf you think one can get warmth and privacy for nothing, you’re mistaken. How could we talk down there?” He pointed to the crowded floor-space; then took her hand, and groped to the highest and most desolate cor- ner. On the screen, the monochrome human shadows per- formed their pale and dismal antics. Square-jawed men sat at roller desks and talked telephonically to each other. Large-eyed pseudo-maidens, difficult to dis- tinguish one from the other, registered sorrow and joy. Automobiles dashed up to modest wooden clipper-built houses, whose interiors, vast and stately, would make Knowle or Longleat fade into the drab of Hydros. There were horses which slept and ate at galloping speed; there were old homes with cradled babies whose venerable grandmothers must have been well over sev- enty when their mothers were born; there was every flatulent negation of Truth as interpreted through the medium of Art, that commercial imbecility at its most: nervous tension could conceive. The drugged public accepted the inanity in stupefied content. The or- 24 PERELLA chestra played ‘Madame Butterfly” while a brave little two-seater car, driven by a big-eyed girl, swam a boil- ing river. “This is just the place for us,” said Anthony, as they took their seats. ‘‘Now we can talk like people in a Dostoievsky play. You'll tell me all about you, and I'll tell you all about me; and then we'll compare notes, and find we haven’t been listening to each other at all, and we’ll have to do it all over ma which will be lovely, won’t it?” “You begin,” said Perella. But youth is youth. And the irony of youth is that the subjective fades before the insistent objective. The idiot story, all the more unintelligible because it was half told when they entered, gripped their delighted and satirical attention. When the end came, they eagerly awaited the re-unfolding of the reel, so as to see the joys which they had missed. It was only when they caught up with their first scene that interest waned. They remained silent for a time. The projected talk would not come spontaneously. Perella suggested the lateness of the hour. “And we can’t watch this dreadful thing going on over and over again. We'll go mad!” He rose. “You’re right. You’re always right. But it seems to me as though I should never be able to tell you the story of my life.” Yet, when they found themselves in the narrow, thronged streets, again, and he took her arm under his in a protective, companionable way, Perella felt a de- licious sense of mtimacy, of a vast Highest Common Factor of existence between them. ‘Their souls had throbbed in unison before the majesty and beauty of the Past; and now their common modernity had rocked in sympathetic laughter. And then he said: PERELLA 25 “Tt doesn’t matter, dear Miss Conscience. We're having a splendid time.” He hailed a victoria. “So splendid that I’m not going to let you get dog-tired and hate me. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being hated.” She yielded meekly, too happy for argument. The drive was the sensuous end of the most amazing chapter of her life. She shivered a little, more from realization of wonder than from cold. Whereupon he pulled off his coat and threw it over her, and tucked it up around her as far as it would go. Her protests rang feeble and unconvincing. “Except when I came from the station, this is the first time I’ve driven in Florence.” “We'll drive like this together every day and all day,” he declared. “I don’t see how you can afford it,” she said. “Neither do I.” He laughed gaily. “But think of the joy of doing things onecan’t afford! I often won- der whether I’m a very lucky chap or the son of Mis- fortune. It all depends on the way you look at it. Here was I brought up in luxury. Just had to stick both hands in my dear old father’s pockets, and out came all the money I wanted. And then, suddenly— everything went phut. ‘There wasn’t a bean among the lot of us. It killed my poor old father. I?ll tell you about it some day.” Her hand instinctively crept beneath the overcoat and sought his. “Oh, how dreadful!” He squeezed her hand. “You’re a dear. It was. We were great pals, you know. Well—what was I saying? Oh, yes. The problem. One fellow says that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Another, that sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. I don’t know. At 26 PERELLA any rate, I’ve learnt how to enjoy life when I get the chance.” He squeezed her hand again, and, bending forward, smiled into her face. “I’m enjoying it now.” They came out on the Lungarno, by the Palazzo Tempi. ‘The scudding clouds had cleared, and opened out a night of stars. Florence stretched away across the river. ‘The dome of the Duomo loomed vague and far away; but Giotto’s campanile leaped gleaming into the firmament. Below them, the river ran dark with many shadows. The cab drew up at the door of the Pension Toselli. “My dear Lady Conscience,” he said, when they en- tered the fusty vestibule, “let us shut our eyes and run upstairs and go to bed, and never open them again until all is cool and beautiful darkness.” The foolish yet romantic phrase rang in Perella’s ears as she lay in the darkness of her little back room, wide awake for most of a wonder-whirling night. To- wards dawn she fell asleep, and—alas, for Michael Angelo and Benvenuto and Giotto! or, on the other hand, they may have had a great deal to do with it— her last drowsy sensation, with the rough blankets drawn up close under her nose, was the comfortable smell of a rough tweed overcoat. CHAPTER III AnTHOoNY Bake, orphan, faced the world, like Orlando, with “but poor a thousand crowns,” or pounds in this case, his heritage from the welter of his father’s affairs. What should he do with it? One of his sis- ters, married to the Head Master of a Public School, advised profitable investment. His other sister, the wife of a Major-General, and a woman of swashbuck- Img flippancy of outlook, said: “Blow it at once.” As neither of these counsels appealed to a young man standing mid-way in temperament between his two sis- ters, he rejected them off-hand. He had already broken away from the soul-building projects of Halli- day Armstrong, and had spent some time in the Art School of the Royal Academy, where he learned the rudiments of drawing from the figure. Prudence urged him back on bended knees to Arm- strong, who combined a squeaky voice with a robust kindness of heart. Besides, he had gone through the Architectural school at Cambridge, and was well on his way to the Final Examination of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 'The gates of a liberal profes- sion were open to him. Why not turn and enter them while yet there was time? But Anthony Blake exceed- ingly disliked falling down on bended knees. He had his pride. He also viewed, with profound distaste, the prospect of being even an eminent R.A.’s assistant on a very few hundreds a year for the rest of his life, unless there happened the absurdly fantastic: to wit, Armstrong’s offering him a partnership, or the win- ning of a gigantic competition which would enable him to put up a brass-plate outside an office of his own. 27 28 PERELLA Originally, when he had set his face against the dreary dealing with stocks and shares, he had conceived Architecture as a congenial avocation for a gentleman of artistic taste and ample fortune. The underground drudgery, good for his soul according to the sensitive artist, Halliday Armstrong, who knew that in no form of art can the butterfly emerge except from the chrys- alis stage of humility, was repugnant to his ideal of existence. He would not drudge; sooner die. For him the untrammelled life of brush or pencil. Here, there was no bending over drawing-boards, ruling lines by T-squares and drawing curves by geometrical formule, and measuring distances off finikin rules divided up into infinitesimal parts of inches, all for the guidance of a blockhead builder. Here one was free, with eye and arm and wrist and hand, to sweep lines and curves according to a man’s own bountiful inspiration. No setting off a human sweep of body, millimetre by milli- metre, with a pair of wretched dividers. A bit of chalk and a sheet of drawing paper, and the rest was whatsoever he chose to make it. He had a very pretty free-hand talent, and a cartoonist’s knack. His short career in the R.A. Schools was not without distinction. The prudent side of him tested a foundation for ar- tistic hope. The flippant and devil-may-care side which he had in common with his sister, Gloria, dreamed the delicious dreams of youth. “My dearest girl,” he said to her, towards the aa of the discussion on the disposal of the heritage, “Ellen is impossible. She looks at me through Everard’s arch- pedagogic eyes, as a Small Boy in an Eton collar who has to be trained in the Christian Virtues, and the Proper Conduct of Life. The nerve of it! She’s only ten years older than I am.” ‘And I’m twelve,” said Gloria. PERELLA 29 “Ym fed up with you too, although you’ve got more sense, though not much more, than Ellen. According to you I should have a couple of months’ good time and then take the dole. Are you and Frank going to sup- plement it?” “My dear boy! .. .” “Of course not. You’re a flaunting, extravagant queen. Poor old Frank’s up to his eyes in debt. As to Ellen—she’s off the map. If I went to her stary- ing, and asked for a meal, she’d calculate it out in vita- mines and calories. No, my dear; I’m not going to come down on either of you. I’m going into the wide world to seek my fortune and I shall husband my thou- sand pounds to the last penny. I’m going first to Italy to soak myself in the spirit of masterpieces. No one can be a painter who doesn’t know everything from Cimabue to Canaletto. My address for the next hun- dred years will be ‘care of Luck, Chance & Co., Earth, Cosmos. Please forward.’ ” And that is how Anthony Blake came to Florence, and, in conspicuous dinner-jacket, arrived late for din- ner in the Pension Toselli, and, in his light, generous and irresponsible way, turned the bewildered little head of Perella. The only comparatively elastic meal at the Pension Toselli was early breakfast. A plate supporting a hunk of bread and a pat of butter remained at a guest’s place at table from eight to half-past nine. At any time during that hour and a half the guest could ring, and Giuseppe, the melancholy serving-man, would bring coffee from some simmering vat in the kitchen. After 9.30 the table was cleared, and the would-be late breakfaster could press the electric button until the battery burst before anyone would take the slightest 30 PERELLA notice of him. Only the Brabazon ladies were privi- leged to breakfast in their own rooms. Those reck- lessly spendthrift or gluttonous, who craved a relish to the meal, had their own little half-consumed store of marmalade, jam, sardines or fruit set beside their plates. Two indecently de-shelled cold hard-boiled eggs marked the seat of the Rev. Mr. Grewson. Mrs. Grewson, pallid and severe, seemed to have a passion for potted anchovy. She, sitting sternly beside the hard-boiled eggs of a sluggard husband, was scooping out the remains of a tin, when Perella entered, about half-past eight, and frigidly acknowledged the girl’s shy salutation. The American young women ate bananas, and squabbled over a map of Florence. The Basil Merrywethers, to judge by unclean remains, had been long since up and on their sturdy, pedestrian way. The Italian couple opposite ate morosely, and made obvious their non- appreciation of the coffee. Perella slipped into her seat, and, after the fashion she had learned in France, broke her bread into her coffee cup, saving up the pat of butter and a crust of bread as a last bonne bouche. he lingered over the meal, hoping that, through the open door of the dining-room, would appear the fasci- nating youth of the night before. But he came not. Mrs. Grewson, after much screech of chair against the tiled-floor, swept out with the air of a woman de- termined to tell her husband that his eggs were getting hot. The American girls went off in a clatter of tongues. The Italians called for fresh coffee, and, con- signing it with expressive gestures to the sewer, made a Fascisti exit. Perella alone, feeling, as usual, small in the big room, lingered wistfully, wondering what apostle of the bili- PERELLA 31 ous could have designed the dreadful wall-paper with its sickly yellow background and its dead blue trellis- work. Mr. Grewson bounded in, wheezy and rubicund. “My dear young lady. I am indeed fortunate. I thought I would have a solitary meal.” He sat down and helped himself to salt. “I hope you and that charming young fellow, who seemed to be quite an ac- quisition to our circle, had a pleasant evening to- gether?” “Very,” said Perella. She rose. From his end of the long table he held up a protesting hand. “You’re not going?” “T’ve finished, and there’s my work at the Gallery.” She fled, her face aflame, conscious of a violent hatred of Mr. Grewson, and his waggish, clerico-paternal leer. He was the mouthpiece of all the cats and trouts, male and female, of the Pension. Her feminine instinct divined beastliness of innuendo. The moth-eaten salon had shrilled with cackle about her sudden elopement with the magnificent young man in a dinner-jacket. She rushed up to her back room, hating Anthony Blake, vowing that she would never see him again; or that, should he ever recross her field of vision, she would: look at him without seeing him. . .. Yes, that was why Mrs. Grewson, who never smiled otherwise than acidly, had grimaced that vitriolic greeting. That was why the American girls had ostentatiously taken no notice of her. . . . Oh, the whole thing was dam- nable! She sat on the edge of her yet unmade bed and cried over the desecration of the only wonder-hour of her life. 32 PERELLA Soon afterwards she sat with easel and bedaubed canvas and painter’s paraphernelia before the miracle of paint she was trying to copy. She wished she knew more about Franciabigio, the friend of Andrea del Sarto. Obviously he was influenced by the Great and Faultless one, but he had his own conception of loveli- ness which redeemed his work from the charge of imita- tion. It had not the other’s quality of perfection which made you take a little quick breath as soon as one of his masterpieces first met your eyes. But it had infinite charm, and magical solace. 'To copy the Madonna del Pozzo was a joy. She felt that it lay within the limits of her comprehension. Had she been set before del Sarto’s majestic Madonna dell’ Arpie, her spirit would have failed, crushed beneath the sense of her littleness. But here was something exquisitely human. Just a pair of soft-fleshed babies, and the smiling Mother of Comfort. And, as she worked, she thought of Franciabigio, and wondered whether he was in Vasari. . . . She wanted to know more about him. But where could she find a Vasari? She thought of all kinds of technical and romantic things that hovered round about the central picture, in order to close her mind to any chance incursion of the young man, An- thony Blake. A fresh English voice behind her, pleading hunger to a zealous friend, aroused her to a sense of time, where- upon she packed up her things and hurried through the great galleries and down the lift, and tripped quickly along the familiar road to the Pension Toselli. She entered the dining-room a minute or two late. All the aquarium—the irreverent young man’s descrip- tion would enter her head—were assembled, with the ex- ception of the Basil Merrywethers. She saw Anthony Blake smiling at her from the far end of the table. PERELLA 33 Other folks seemed to smile at her, even Mrs. Grewson. Madame Toselli stopped her as she passed, and handed her a visiting card. | *“You’ve had a caller this morning.” “And a very distinguished one,” said the elder Miss Brabazon, with an air of patronage. “Why didn’t you say you knew Mr. Gayton?” asked the younger. Perella reddened, and said “Oh!” and looked at the card—that of Mr. Silvester Gayton—with an address in the Viale Milton. She carried it in her hand and laid it beside her plate, as she took her seat beside Anthony Blake, to whose cheery greeting she replied distantly. But he was irrepressible. “They’re all frantically excited about that,” said he, pointing to the card. “The Archangel Gabriel coming to make an Announcement wouldn’t have caused a greater sensation.” “T don’t see why,” said Perella primly. “Professor Gayton is only a friend of my father’s.” “But the old insect’s the greatest bug in Florence— don’t you understand that? Don’t you know his books on the gaudy place? If one fellow four hundred years ago jabbed a brush of paint on another fellow’s picture, he spots it at once. The Italian Ministry of Bell Arte grovel before him. The old pussies up there were once introduced to him after a lecture, and were purring about it when I came in.” She helped herself to vague food. “How do you know all about him?” she asked. “How do I know about God and the Equator and Beecham’s Pills? Besides, I, humble worm that I am, have a letter of introduction to him in my pocket.” She might have guessed it. If he had told her that 99 34 PERELLA he bore introductions to the King and the Pope, she would not have been surprised. “Who gave it to you?” “Old man Armstrong, of course,” he replied care- lessly. ‘‘Who else?” A cloud swept across her vision of his splendour. She had a quick little practical mind. “But wasn’t Mr. Armstrong rather hurt at your leaving his office?” “Not so much as I. I’ve made a point of blotting out of my memory the words he used to me.” “Then,” said Perella, “it was very kind and forgiy- ing of him to give you this valuable letter of introduc- tion.” “My dear Conscience,” said he, “I’m admiring you more and more every minute.” Isolated by the deaf old lady on her right, and the morose Italians opposite, next whom were the vacant seats of the Merrywethers, they had all the talk to themselves. He described his morning in the City of Wonder. He had wandered about, and, by the aid of a map, had established his topography of Florence. He declared it a marvel of a place. At every street corner you were jostled by history. He had felt so sore and so black and blue that, after two or three hours of it, he had to crawl into Doney’s and have a cock- tar “But that’s a most expensive place,” she cried. “Of course I’ve never been there. . . . Besides, how did you know where it was?” Said Anthony, with his engaging smile: ‘When you know me better, you will realize what a a man of infinite resource I am. I was in fainting need of stimulant. I approached a florid gentleman glued to the window of an antiquity shop. I took off my hat PERELLA 35 in the manner of the Old School. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ said I, with unerring instinct. ‘Are you an Ameri- can?’ He said: ‘I am.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘will you have the kindness to tell an English stranger where he can get a cocktail in this city?? He smiled, and said: ‘I will’—and directed me to the Via Tornabuoni.” Finding ‘no suitable response, Perella went on with her eating. “If you’re a good little untroublesome Conscience, I’ll take you to tea there.” She shook her head. She had to work. “But you can’t work after the galleries close. They turn you out. Just in time for tea.” “I don’t like that kind of tea.” “But why?” **Because ” said Perella. He noted an impatient gesture of her shoulders, and a tiny look of distress in her face; and a glimmer of her reasons dawned on his careless man’s mind. Who went to Doney’s otherwise than in furs and silken hose and dainty shoes? She confirmed his intuition by add- ing: 7 “I’ve looked through the windows and don’t care for the kind of people I’ve seen there.” “We'll avoid it then, like the plague,” he said. “All the same,” he continued, “I’m glad I went im. [ve had an adventure.” In his glad, picturesque way he told her the history of a chance encounter. Sitting at a small table in the crowded middle room, along one side of which runs the bar, was an old Cam- bridge friend, Charlie Dent, entertaining a charming American lady. “Oh, quite an elderly lady, Conscience dear—let us say, in motor-jargon, thirty-five.” It was Dent who had recommended the Pension Toselli. 36 PERELLA Anthony had thought him still in Rome, whence he had last heard from him. Dent was a very clever fellow, an engineer with an unhealthy passion for numismatics. Having come into much money, he had abandoned the bridge-maker’s trade and found the Meaning of Life in dangling over ancient coins and modern tea-cups. “The desperate fellow was drinking chocolate,” said Anthony. “I love chocolate,” said Perella demurely. “But you’re not a numismatical engineer who has run off with a proctor’s cap. It’s a great comedown for Charlie.” Of the nature of a proctor and the sacrosanctity of his cap, Perella had but a vague idea. She accepted meekly the condemnation of Charlie Dent. This was by no means the end of the Adventure. Who should walk in when he was half-way through his second cocktail—Perella’s subtle mind could gather that he had been entertained at Doney’s free of expense —hbut the very American of whom he had asked his way, with a “Hullo, Beatrice, Hullo, Charlie,” and sit down at the table. His name was Cornelius Adams, and he had a villa outside Florence. Anthony was going to see him one of these days. He rubbed his hands together. “Pretty crowded morning, wasn’t it?” ‘“‘And the lady?” asked Perella. Anthony thought she lived in Florence. A Mrs. Ellison. Answered, according to the Adams man, to the name of Beatrice. She was off by car to Paris on the morrow, but hoped to see him when she came back. Perella crumbled her bread, and looked depressedly at the black and grey banana on her plate. He had already mounted into the Doney sphere that was his own, peopled by butterfly numismatical engineers, 99 PERELLA 37 American millionaires who owned villas, and wealthy women, all furs and pearls and violets, who thought less of taking motor-cars to Paris than she of taking tram to the Cascine. For all his gay and intimate talk, he seemed piteously remote. But soon afterwards she found herself accompanied by him on her return walk to the Uffizi; more than that —to her easel in front of the Franciabigio, in spite of almost tearful protest. But his frank and vehement admiration comforted her artistic soul. She was the most amazing little tame Conscience that ever was. Henceforward he would follow her the world over, humbly holding up her train. He went off by himself to see the glories of the gallery, and returned towards closing time to the earnest little dark-eyed figure put- ting in the last few touches of the day. “Now we’re going to be really happy,” said he. “We've got hours and hours im front of us. The world is ours—to say nothing of Florence.” “Don’t you want to go to your friends?” she asked. “When you’re about I snap my fingers at the whole lot of them.” He had a merry eye and a persuasive laugh and a lithe young figure, and the impression she had of his dress was a careless yet elegant harmony of blues and browns. All her men acquaintances were distinguished by sloppy and untidy shoes. Anthony’s shoes were as neat as those best brown ones of hers which she had saved up for months to buy. And, as they walked to- gether, she glanced, with an idiotic pride, at the young man’s shapely feet. He gave her tea, not at Doney’s, but at the establish- ment of a humbler and more discreet panderer to Brit- ish superstition. Apparently unknown, it wore a dis- mal and stale appearance. Only two tables were 38 PERELLA occupied, each by drooping tourist women. But to Perella, with Anthony’s gay smile opposite her, it seemed a Palace of all the Lovely Verities. And a flush came to her pale cheeks, and a light in her eyes. And at last, Anthony looking at her whimsically, said: “Do you know, Miss Perella Conscience, that you’re jolie & croquer?”’ “What’s that?” she asked, for, though she had roamed solitary about Paris, her French seemed to be deficient. “Pretty enough to eat—like a chocolate out of an expensive box.” Which, though exceedingly silly, pleased Perella more than any heretofore recorded utterance of man; and it deepened the gold of the afternoon sunshine when they went out into the street, and, when they emerged into the Piazza del Duomo, invested Giotto’s Campanile in the pink of porphyry soaring into the Empyrean. She mounted the fusty stairs of the Pension in a dream. “Tt’s rotten,” he said, “that I’ve got to go out to dinner to-night. Charlie Dent asked me. You see,” he added hurriedly, “I’ve got to earn a living somehow, and he may put me in the way of it. It won’t do to miss chances.” “Of course you must go,” she said, as though she were already responsible for his career. “But your” “I’ve had such a lovely tea,” said Perella. She was content. To ask more from the high gods than what they had given her that day would have been presumption such as in the mythical times of which she had read would have been punished by some peculiarly PERELLA 39 unpleasant metamorphosis into a toad or a stinging- nettle or a Mrs. Grewson. “Pll pick you off your little stool at the gallery to- morrow morning,” he said, as they parted on the land- ing. . In the dark passage leading from the salon to the dining-room was fixed the screen where the guests’ cor- respondence was hung in clips. Now, few human be- ings are so forlorn that they abandon hope for a mes- sage from the outside world. Perella, as she passed the end of the corridor, cast an instinctive wistful glance at the screen. And there, in very truth, was a letter. It was written in a small, beautifully clear, pointed, scholarly hand. She turned the page to find it signed: “Yours sincerely, Silvester Gayton.” It ran: Dear Miss Annaway, May I introduce myself as an old friend of your father, who wrote to me a day or two ago telling me that you were in Florence. He did me so many a good turn in the years gone by, that, if it is in my power to be of any service to his daughter, I shall be only too pleased to render it. There is much to be seen in Florence that is closed to the general public. I was so sorry to miss you this morning when I called, but I was comforted by the information I received that you were at work at the Uffizi. I wonder whether you will do me the pleasure of taking tea with me to-morrow afternoon? I am diffident in asking you, for the Viale Milton is a long way from the Lungarno. But if I hear by telephone that you accept, you will find at four o'clock, standing outside the Uffizi public entrance, a car with a royal purple handkerchief spread over the steering wheel. If you will honour me by entering it, the chauffeur will do the rest. I have one or two things in my little collection which I hope may compensate you for your journey. 40 PERELLA Perella dined, not disconsolately, talking across the table to the dusty Basil Merrywethers who had tray- elled by tram, train and on foot God knows where; and, after the meal, suffered gladly the facetie of the Rev. Mr. Grewson and the newly-stirred curiosity of the Brabazon ladies, who deferred for twenty minutes their sacred evening rubber of bridge in order to im- press upon her mind their knowledge of what the em- inent Professor Gayton knew about Florence. She went to bed early, a very happy Perella, trying to reconcile the long white beard and the patronizing manner with the tenor of the letter which she had just received. The final touch of puzzledom was the royal purple handkerchief on the steering wheel. No stuffy, snuffy old fossil could have thought of such a thing. There was something imaginative, simple, childlike about it. It was comic. She laughed. But it was very, very kind. She snuggled into her hard and nubbly little bed. It was almost a sacrilege to blot out all this Won- der of Life in animal slumber. She must live the day over again. Whereupon, in order to do so, she turned over with a happy sigh, and slept the profound, happy sleep of youth through the livelong night. CHAPTER IV Tue serviceable, old-fashioned car from whose steering-wheel the chauffeur had swept the royal pur- ple pall, drove up to the decorous pile of apartment houses on the bank of the Mugnone. Perella stepped out and mounted the stairs. An elderly woman serv- ant opening the professor’s door, showed her into a room, a very beautiful room, she thought, with a view far away over the northern hills, Monte Morello tow- ering among them. A wood fire was burning below a Renaissance fireplace. A few pictures, mostly Prim- itives, hung on an austere wall. The room was sparsely furnished; but Perella’s eye quickly appreci- ated the severe charm of the old rugs on the polished floor, and the perfection of chairs and tables and old Florentine book-cases filled with leather-bound vol- umes. Some old ivories lay about. A paper knife with chased silver handle lay across an open, half-cut French novel, the only note of modernity. She peeped at it—it was one of the Arséne Lupin series. She found it hard to reconcile a Professor with a reader of detective novels. This was the home of a man, a notorious bachelor—so much practical information had she gleaned from the Brabazon ladies. In her concept of man it was always difficult to rid her mind of parental impressions. A man’s room was her father’s ramshackle, dirty den, lit- tered with pipes, tobacco, magazines, newspapers, manuscript, slippers, and bananas of which he was in- ordinately fond. She could not imagine Anthony in this prim setting, though, of course, he would like it kept clean, and a fresh cretonne put, now and then, on his arm-chairs. . . . But, anyhow—she looked round 41 42 PERELLA again—it was a singularly beautiful and restful room. The door opened. Someone entered. “My dear Miss Annaway. Do forgive me for keep- ing you waiting. It seems so rude, but I really couldn’t help it.” It was no doubt her host, Silvester Gayton, but where were the white beard and the stuffiness and snuffiness? She beheld a little brown-haired man, with a bald patch on the top of his head, and,a little brown moustache, - who looked at her apologetically through thick near- sighted pince-nez. He was very neatly dressed. Ob- viously he was no longer young; his lined and withered face proclaimed the touch of the years; but he might have been any age, from forty to seventy. He fluttered around her with the air of a shy, elderly boy. “Do sit down.” He pulled a heavy old Florentine chair towards the fire. “I think this is fairly comfort- able. And you’d like some tea. Of course you would.” He rang a bell. “And won’t you take off your coat? There!” He gave it to the servant who entered immediately, and, having ordered tea, sat on a high-backed chair on the other side of the fireplace. Then he half rose. “Would you like a footstool? No? You see, I live so much alone that I don’t know. . . . If you can think of anything to make you more comfortable, please tell me.” Perella declared herself to be perfectly content; and then it dawned on her feminine mind that this eminent and awe-inspiring professor was even more nervous than she herself. She gathered up her courage. “Tt’s most kind of you to ask me to come and see ou.” “Not atall. Notatall. Your father once did mea PERELLA 43 very great service. He fought a splendid battle for me in the press. I should have never been able to do it myself. You’re too young to remem- ey aad “Do tell me about it,”’ said Perella. “It wouldn’t interest you. It’s Ancient History.” “But I’m tremendously proud of my father,” said Perella. In a shy and diffident way he outlined the story of the battle. A Prussian critic had attacked him. ... He had written a little book about Italian Art. Those being days when nothing thorough could come from anywhere but Germany, all the English critics leagued themselves with the Teuton. He had falsified the philosophical history of Art; his attributions of dis- puted masterpieces were idiotic—in fact, the book was the work of an amateur ignoramus. A great London newspaper invited him to defend himself—he was in England at the time. They sent John Annaway to see him. John Annaway, convinced, and in possession of indisputable facts, took up his battle-ax and, in Sil- vester Gayton’s mild and archaic words, “went like billy ’o for the whole lot of them.” He raked up the Prus- sian’s dreadful critical past. . . . There was a certain statue bought by him for Berlin as an authentic Prax- iteles which no one on earth except the then Kaiser, recognized as being other than an impudent modern fake. . . . He poured ridicule on the German’s theory of the Weltgeist manifesting itself in Fra Angelico and his followers, and . . . “Well,” said Gayton apologet- ically, “he won the battle for me. And then I wrote a little article for the Quarterly Review, which finished the thing up.” “But father wrote me that you were very kind to him,” said Perella. AA PERELLA “No, no,” said Silvester hurriedly; “that’s absurd. It’s his charming way of putting it.” Tea was brought in. He fussed round the table. He hoped she found what she liked. He had told them to get the biggest, thickest and stickiest cake in Flor- ence, and such odds and ends as would lead artistically up to it. The table creaked under the odds and ends, and groaned under the cake. Perella caught a little breath of wonder at the old silver tea equipage and the egg-shell china cups. He stood, deferential, before her. “Ts the tea as you like it?” She realized that she hadn’t tasted it, flushed, and said simply: “Everything you have is so beautiful.” He smiled. “I’m so glad you like beautiful things. If I dared give you advice, I should say, don’t let the instinct grow atrophied. It’s the greatest gift a hu- man being can have. Life’s full of beauty and the happiest people are those who know how to collect it. It has infinite forms. What you see around you is a poor little form. It has just happened by chance to have come my way. But there are spiritual forms—I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear—mem- ories of sunsets and bits of cool reaches of river, and a white city dreaming in the moonlight—which the con- noisseur can collect. . . . And then, of course, there are the most sacred beauties of all . . . your collection of what is most precious in the souls of human be- ings. ...” He laughed, shyly, and sipped his tea. “That, of course, takes a good deal of courage.” “What?” she asked. “Why, don’t you see? It’s like hunting for hidden treasure, or diving for pearls—every time an adven- ture. It isn’t everybody that’s adventurous.” PERELLA AD5 Perella wondered whether that was the reason of his bachelordom; whether at the back of his little speech there did not lie an apology for filling his existence with the interpretations (however beautiful) of life, instead of the actualities of life itself—love, wife, chil- dren. ... He cut her a hasty wedge of the juicy cake and then went off to throw logs on the fire. “And now”—he turned—“your father said I might help you. If I can I will, of course. But first I must be impertinent enough to ask you what you are do- ing?” Emboldened by the tea, the warmth, the nervous fig- ure of the deferential elderly boy in the opposite chair, she narrated her simple history—or as much of it as mattered. Perella thought him the most sympathetic listener to whom she had ever spoken. He had an odd and delightful little way of getting ahead of her thoughts and finishing up her sentences. They dis- cussed the Madonna del Pozzo. It used to be attrib- uted, said he, to Andrea del Sarto—he and Francia- bigio had, she must remember, once worked on the same canvas. His Prussian enemy had done his best to per- petuate the old error. But anyone could see the differ- ence. “With half an eye!” cried Perella, forgetting that she was talking to one of the World’s Greatest Author- ities. He made a pleased little gesture, as though accept- ing her on the spot as a Sister Authority. Having learned how far she was advanced in her work, he said: “T know how painters hate it—but, if you could put up with me—I should so much like to see your copy. The growth of artistic things is so fascinating. I once went through the rehearsals of a friend of mine, 46 PERELLA rather a famous actor. He was so flattering as to ask me to look over a Renaissance Italian setting—and really, to see an acted play in the making—the men and women struggling hour by hour in the throes of artistic creation—was a revelation. ‘To me far more interesting than the finished product. . . . You will let me come and see your copy soon, won’t you?” “Of course; I should love it,” she exclaimed. “May I come to-morrow?” Then suddenly she remembered, and went hot and cold all over, and knew not whether her cheeks were ashen or flushed scarlet. The Greatest Authority in the World was coming to see her poor little copy—and there was that impossible out-of-drawing bit of thigh of the chubby St. John. She gasped. “But as yet it’s dreadful. It’s all so difficult.” “Not if you treat it reverently. The moment you try to improve the fault of a masterpiece you’re lost.” His insight was uncanny. She looked at him in amazement. “How did you know?” “T happen to know—what shall we call it?—the snags of the picture.” Suddenly he rose in concerned apology. He was the worst host in Italy, which was saying a great deal. There was a box of chocolates which he had overlooked. And a box of cigarettes. He presented both. Her chastened mood prompted the choice of chocolate. He lit a cigarette. Then took her the tour of his treas- ures in his dining-room, work-room and an outer hall. “T suppose it’s childish,” said he; “but I do love showing these things to people who can appreciate them.” At the end of the tour she took her leave. He ac- companied her to the flat door; and, as he held her PERELLA AT hand, he looked at her rather wistfully, his head on one side. “My dear child—TI can call you so because I’m years older than your father—in order to get along in a rough world we all need plenty of courage—and I think you’ve gotit. Good-bye till to-morrow.” He opened the door. Then he suddenly left her and quickly reappeared with the ornamental box of choco- lates. “Forgive me—I’m an awful idiot. But I got them especially for you.” The waiting car took her back to the Pension Toselli. She wondered how old he was. He said he was years older than her father. He couldn’t be ninety. That was absurd. At moments, he seemed quite young. Altogether he was a puzzle—a delightful one, but a puzzle. Now and then, through his shy desire to please flashed a shaft of authority, revealing him for a mo- ment as a man of a certain greatness of soul and mind. When Anthony asked her at dinner: “Well, did you see the Grand Panjandrum?” his note of ir- reverence jarred. Instinctively she administered re- buke. “T didn’t personally ; but I’ve no doubt other people might have done.” He laughed. “Which means, my Guide, Philosopher and Conscience, that when I visit him I must go clad in the garments of humility.” “‘You’d better choose the garments carefully,” she retorted. Presently she relented. ‘““He’s a very big man, of course, Anthony; but really he’s the very dearest of dears.” “Ts there a man who wouldn’t be that for the sake of your beaux yeux?” said he. 48 PERELLA Perella, who was very young in the ways of men, met his laughing eyes and flushed and forgave him. And the wise youth adroitly pursued the turn of the conver- sation. There followed for Perella some weeks of unspoiled happiness. Professor Silvester Gayton, a meek little figure in an old-fashioned bowler hat, had appeared in the gallery, saluted deferentially by the uniformed at- tendant at the door, and had praised her copy of the Franciabigio, and, in his hesitating, apologetic way, had made valuable suggestions. The fruits of his approval manifested themselves shortly afterwards by an offer from a Florentine dealer for a copy of the Deposizione of Fra Bartolomeo in the Pitti, on behalf of an Argen- tine millionaire who was adding a Renaissance Picture Gallery to his palace in Buenos Aires. The road to fortune gleamed golden before her. Through Silves- ter Gayton she made the acquaintance of the Marchesa della Torre, an elderly English lady, a widow, who lived in a queer little old Palazzo poked away behind the Strozzi. The relations between the Marchesa and the Professor suggested to Perella’s nostrils the perfume of an old romance. When she told the Marchesa that her mother was an Italian, the daughter of a Roman poet, the old lady fervently insisted on her learning the language of her mother’s country, and produced from the whirlpool of her late husband’s family a pretty girl, one Lucia Demonetti, who was willing to give Italian lessons in exchange for English. The lessons were given in the Demonetti apartment, delightfully reminiscent, in a queer way, of the Battersea flat, for which, now and then, she felt a child’s nostalgia. As a medium of com- PERELLA 49 munication the two young women employed a dreadful French. And there was Anthony all the time, gay, delightful, holding her heart in tender hands. Her wan and fragile beauty began to bloom from insignificance into definition. Even to herself she seemed to occupy a greater space in the world. ‘To her further content, Anthony had begun to work. All owing, said he, to the example and precept of his adorable Conscience. His Cambridge friend, Charlie Dent, had made him show his portfolio of old drawings to Cornelius Adams, the ‘American gentleman who had set him on the cocktail path. Cornelius Adams had invited him to his villa and commissioned a crayon portrait for a favourite daughter in Scotland. Anthony had a bold line and a flourish and a magical trick of portraiture. The drawing commanded instant appreciation. Exhibited proudly by the possessor to the Anglo-American colony, it brought in two or three stray orders. He began to discuss with Perella the most suitable locality in which he could set up a studio. It became the nominal ob- ject of many walks during which they incidentally sat- urated themselves with the intimate atmosphere of beauty in paint and stone, which to all but Italians is the only reason for the existence of Florence. Thus Anthony Blake, dismissing with a supercilious hand the pulsating spirit of New Italy. Why should he or any foreigner care a hang about the modern significance of the place? Would a cultivated Italian go into the mildest of raptures over Glasgow or Manchester or Birmingham, which, as cities, could swallow up modern Florence and forget all about it? Florence only lived as an eternal message of the centuries. The very type and temper of the citizens were the same as in the days of the Gonfaloniere. The black-shirted Fascisti going 50 PERELLA about the streets might have burned—or stopped the living cremation according to Piedmont—of Savon- arola. < He had the superficial history of the place at his tongue’s end. His academical studies in architecture at Cambridge had led him into the pleasant paths of Italian art which are inextricably intertwined with those of Italian history. He could put dates on arches and traceries and pilasters and cornices with incredible ease. She thought him wonderful. The travelling card of the Royal Institute of British Architects, duly visé-d by the Italian Consul in London, and the card of recommendation given to Perella by Professor Gayton, gave them privileges denied to the casual sight-seer. Now and again old instinct would compel him to an architectural sketch. Perella looked longingly at his deft fingers. Hers were of no use for delicate drawing . . . She wished someone would commission her to copy frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, or the cloisters of San Marco, while Anthony should look on. . . . Meanwhile, they did not find the studio. Anthony had presented his letter of introduction to Professor Gayton, and been politely received. ‘““He gave me the impression,” said he to Perella, “that he had just been pulled by a conjuror out of a hat, and didn’t know where he was.”’ Perella laughed, the incorrigible youth having estab- lished in her eyes his charter of libertinage. But she would have liked more cordiality in the relations be- tween Anthony and the Professor. 'The latter’s ver- dict was: “Yes, my dear. Quite a talented young man. He’ll make his way, no doubt. I find he knows a number of people in Florence already. They’ll be of considerable service to him.” PERELLA 51 And then he broke out into a panegyric on that really great man, Halliday Armstrong, R.A., whose erudition was equalled only by his artistry. Which was his nervous way of indicating that he had no peculiar use for Anthony Blake. “He really does love the old things,” said Perella. “As an artist he must,” said Silvester Gayton. “But he doesn’t love them quite in the way that you and I do.” This little talk took place one afternoon at the Marchesa’s, where she had met him taking tea. She had met him several times since his inspection of her picture—once or twice she had. gone, on his in- vitation, to the flat in the Viale Milton—refusing, with discreet wisdom, the offer of the car, and journeying thither quite comfortably by tram. One Sunday he took the Marchesa and herself up to Fiesole where, los- ing shyness of speech, he breathed the breath of life into the crumbling tiers of seats and the broken columns of the ancient theatre, and made the majesty of Rome live again before their eyes; filled the cold place with eager citizens, and enacted, so that they saw it vividly, the drama on the strange and unfamiliar stage. Here Per- ella, accustomed to rare gleams, came under the spell of his lambent genius. Now she understood why men had called him the inspired teacher and why half the gov- ernments and universities of Christendom had showered honours on his bald and modest head. By the magic of his art he had transferred, almost hypnotically, his per- fect vision to her brain. She remembered ee that the guardian had welcomed him with reverent obsequiousness and had ad- dressed him as Commendatore, which explained to her the meaning of the little rosette he wore in his button- hole. 52 PERELLA Later the Marchesa had shown her his record in a treasured old Who’s Who? “Tf he wore all his hoods and decorations at once,” laughed the lady, “there’d be nothing left of him visi- ble.” Perella caught the date of his birth. Yes, he was quite old, far older than her father, who was not yet fifty. She remembered that, when they turned away to visit the cold little archeological museum near by, the Marchesa, had said to him: “My dear Silvester, what a wonder you are! How you make the past live!” And he had replied: “If you can’t see the past as a Living Thing, what’s the use of worrying about it? The present facts about ruins are as valueless as patient measurements of any old bit of jagged rock on a mountain side. And what’s the good of reconstructing the ground plan of a site like a geometrical puzzle, unless it leads to an accurate imagining of the whole building? 'To go to painting —what’s the good of staring like an idiot at my belovéd Primitives, unless you can project yourself into the historically-conditioned outlook on life of the painter and the people for whom he painted? Primitives are either dead or they’re astonishingly alive. When silly asses call Primitives ‘quaint,’ I see red, and want to bite them.” Perella thought of Anthony who had dismissed the whole lot of them—Cimabue, Giotto, Ducio, Spinello Aretini—with a gay wave of the hand. “They get at one somehow,” he had said. ‘“One’s sorry for them, I suppose. They meant well, but they’re funny old fowls just the same.” She wondered what the Professor would have said to PERELLA 53 this. She pictured him perched on a chair and sav- agely biting Anthony’s ear. But this was only a passing sense of the comic, which made for endearing rather than disillusionment. She began to adore him in her young and tender way. His shyness, his horror of publicity, kept him remote from the ever-changing, semi-cultivated Anglo-Saxon society that, were it given its way, would have flowed an embarrassing, adulatory stream through his pleasant leisure from year’s end to year’s end. Hence, almost against his will, and certainly without his knowledge, there had gone up a legend of his unapproachable Grand Lama seclusion. On a lecture platform, in- spired by his poetic vision, he was a compelling force; in a cosmopolitan drawing-room, he became but a be- wildered and stammering undergraduate. Yet he was not unsociable. ‘To a few houses in Florence he went in secrecy as a delighted guest; and his intimates were welcomed in the beautiful rooms in the Viale Milton. All of this Perella knew; on the one side, from the gos- sip of the Pension Toselli, where, as one living under the xgis, as it were, of the awe-inspiring dictator, she felt humorously inclined to put on airs; and on the - other, from her own observation and the confidences of the Marchesa della Torre. His courteous, ever apologetic kindliness warmed her young life. Why he should ever have given a second thought to so insignificant a speck on his horizon as her- self, she was at a loss to imagine. She supposed it was on account of her wonderful father, to whom she wrote reams of glowing description which bored the uninter- ested journalist to tears. “All about this dismal fellow,” said he, displaying the sheets to the devoted lady who kept him out of the Fuddlers’ Club, “and not a word about my liver and 54 PERELLA my gout and my dreadful struggle for existence. Lear is the typical father of all time.” Still, he was generous. On her birthday he sent her a Treasury Note for a pound, bidding her buy a nice little frock with it. Perella wondered whether father was ever more adorable than hers. This by way of parenthesis, to show one of the many gleams of the soft radiance under which Perella had her being. Star-dust, as it were, with her dear Pro- fessor serene and restful moon. But Anthony blazed in her firmament a wondrous sun. The day of days dawned for her on the Saturday be- fore Easter. For then, against even ecclesiastical as- tronomics, the sun and moon were to be in conjunction. The first thrill of it had been communicated a week before. Scarcely had she sat down to dinner than the dilapidated waiter rushed out and returned and whis- pered to Madame Toselli. Madame Toselli, command- ing silence, apostrophized Perella. “Miss ee Professor Gayton wants you on the telephone.” The light of expectation danced in her eyes, and she fled out, no longer feeling herself the smallest of all possible persons in the greatest of all possible worlds. Her intimacy with the Great Recluse had gained her the envious respect of the Pension. 'The Brabazon la- dies had invited her to tea in their musty little private sitting-room at the back, and, before seeking to pump her dry, had endeavoured to set themselves on the same plane by exhibiting a couple of letters, ornamented with butterflies, written by Whistler to their aunt. Madame Toselli had transferred her to a room with a less chimney-potty outlook, and offered, if she swore in- violable secrecy, to let her have her early breakfast PERELLA 55 in bed. Also, one evening the Grewsons had invited her out to dinner to meet a pair of lost Archdeacons (male and female, and conjugally bound) from Demarara. Said Anthony: “If you make love to him over the telephone, Ill commit suicide by eating everything that is offered me.” Thus it was a Personage that, in the guise of a tiny scrap of humanity, slipped along the side of the table and out of the room. She returned, flushed and excited. “Oh, Anthony, isn’t it lovely? He has asked us to go to the Scoppio del Carro on Saturday!” “TJs aad She nodded brightly. ‘“Yes—us. You and me and us two. He goes every year, and always has the same baleony. Of course I said you’d come. You will, won’t you?” “Naturally. It’s jolly decent of him,” said An- thony. “I wonder what made him think of me.” A rare mood of gaiety caught her. “Who could ever see you, Antonio, without thinking of you?” He responded with uplifted hand. “Enough, woman. I’ve heard that sort of thing be- fore.” That is why the wings of the dawn awoke her to happiness on that Saturday morning. The whole of Tuscany seemed to be pouring through the narrow streets towards the Piazza del Duomo, as they made their way to the scene of the historical Burn- ing of the Car. To keep her by his side, Anthony tucked his hand beneath her arm, and steered her hap- pily through the welter of men and horses and groan- ing automobiles. Everyone looked excited and happy 56 PERELLA and anxious, for it was a most important ceremony that was to take place—nay more—the last lingering au- gury sanctioned by the Church forecasting the sum- mer’s harvest. ‘The Babel precluded coherent speech. But what did words matter when his arm bent strongly round her to save her new hat from the wet nose of a cab-horse? The Piazza was seething with humanity when they reached the shop on the western side above which was Professor Gayton’s balcony. They mounted to the welcome of the proprietor who for years had placed his salon at the Professor’s disposal. They were the first comers; but the Commendatore would soon arrive—he looked at his watch—always in time for the great pro- cession. Here was the best view of the Scoppio in Florence. They went on to the balcony. On the right the ‘white and black marble front of the domed cathedral flanked by the towering Campanile gleamed in the keen April sunlight. On the left stood the lesser but ex- quisite mass of the Baptistery. ‘The only place, from skyline to ground, clear of human heads and faces lay between the two buildings. And in the midst thereof, close to the Baptistery and centred with the great West Door, and, so, with the far away hidden High Altar of the Cathedral, rose heavenward the red and gold struc- ture of the Car, from whose shafts had been withdrawn the four pure white oxen, whose sole duty in life was to drag the Carro from and to its resting-place on one day of the year. And, just visible as the sunlight glinted here and there on them, two wires ran from the Car across the Piazza straight into the Great West Door. Humanity everywhere, at windows, on roofs, on rough deal stands; an ever-thickening crush below, as all Tuscany crowded into the great square from its PERELLA 57 many tributary streets. Year after year, for centu- ries, the same crowd had gathered to see the same queer and childish, yet soul-uplifting spectacle. “Charlie Dent,” said Anthony, “is the miserablest worm of a fool unstamped on.” Perella asked why. He swept a hand. “He wanted me to cut this out and motor to some rotten villa for lunch. Talked through his ugly hat. By the way, he wears the filthiest hats I know—soft brims turned down. I hate ’em. Never trust a man with that kind of hat... . Lord! I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Don’t you feel the thrill of it?” They were leaning over the balcony rail and their arms were touching. Perella drew a little breath of content. Certainly she felt the thrill of it. Soon they were joined by the Professor, neat in a new tweed suit of old-fashioned cut, the jacket tightly buttoned, bowler hat and gloves; the old Marchesa, stout and rather lame; the Master of the Cambridge College, his wife and daughter; and a deliciously rugged, untidy, red-headed man with an eye-glass, whom Perella felt sure she would love, long before she realized him as Mr. Haddo Thwaites, sculptor and Royal Academician. “My dear,” said Gayton, in his fussy, nervous way, “T want you to take good care of Miss Edwardes, you being a resident, she a visitor.” His eyes beamed be- hind the thick lenses of his glasses. “I count on you to do the honours.” Thus was her function prescribed in the somewhat lordly company. But what of Anthony? Out of the tail of her eye she saw him bracketed with Mrs. Ed- wardes, a severe, high-nosed lady with a mission in life, hovering on the tantalizing borderland of the obscure and the obvious. 58 PERELLA It was only afterwards that Anthony resolved her problem. “‘A channel,” said he, “through whom run Dons past, present and future.” Dr. Edwardes, layman, scientist, up-to-date Head of a venerable college which he was pushing to the front with almost American energy, was paired with the Mar- chesa, an old friend. ‘Thus were the six chairs in the front of the balcony occupied. Again, out of the tail of her eye, did Perella glance backward at the Profes- sor. He caught her glance, almost winked, so that she was delightfully conscious of a confidential message. He was perfectly happy with Haddo Thwaites, who stood over him with a grip on both shoulders, shaking him as though he loved him. She turned to the pale girl by her side, who seemed a curious negative of feminine coquetry in attire and manner. Miss Edwardes wore black stockings and stout black shoes with which could woman born, pul- sating with a thousand spring certainties, hopes and fears, refrain from contrasting the juxtaposed fawn silk and dainty fawn suéde? And in her timid, gentle way, Perella tried to carry out her host’s behest. Said Amelia Edwardes, in her second year at Girton, in reply to the obvious commonplace: “Of course I’ve read all about it. It has an archeo- logical interest ; but doesn’t it strike you as being dread- fully silly?” She waved her hand to the surging crowd below, to the barbaric car, for which the banks of the Ganges _ were perhaps a fitter setting than the banks of the Arno, to the quivering, dancing wires. “Just look at them now.” A child’s balloon—there were many vendors in the crowd—had escaped, and came soaring, a red, minia- PERELLA 59 ture Mars, over the Bargello, into the infinite height of the blue. In an instant the massed Piazza became a shimmering mass of upturned faces, like a vast field of wild flowers stirred by the breeze. The young lady from Girton cast upward a scorn- ful glance. “Did you ever see anything so idiotic? These peo- ple are really in the same state they were in four hun- dred years ago.” Perella spent a few deliberate moments in travel to- wards this new point of view. She failed to reach it. “But that’s the beauty of this—well, this show—to- day. It bears out what Professor Gayton is always saying. He said it wonderfully the other day. ‘So long as the past lives, the present can’t die.’ ”’ “What about the future?” asked Amelia Edwardes, with a twist of her thin lips. Parrot Perella quoted: “It’s the child of the Present, and the grandchild of the Past.” ““Plausible, but damned nonsense,” said Miss Ed- wardes. ‘“There’s an undistributed middle somewhere in the logic. Dead things are dead, and they can’t come to life again. If anybody handed me my great- grandmother’s skeleton as a great treat, I’d say: ‘Take it away and burn it and make chlorate of potash, or whatever you make of bones, with it, and use it for manure, but don’t ask me to be sentimental.’ ” Perella again pondered awhile. ““But the chlorate of potash, or whatever it is, would make things grow, wouldn’t it? Even the old bones would carry on.” Miss Edwardes dismissed the argument. “We're talking of psychology, not chemistry. Just look at this. What can it mean to human reason?” ‘60 PERELLA From the cathedral, heralded by a murmur of the populace, streamed an august procession, incense- swinging, crozier-bearing, chanting; boys gorgeous in scarlet and white lace; priests in Easter vestments; mi- tred bishops, dazzling in gold brocade; each personage who emerged from the western door seeming the last word in ecclesiastical splendour, till the appearance, under the velvet canopy, of the scarlet-robed Cardinal Archbishop of Florence. Majestically it wound across the open space, and gradually and inevitably it disap- peared into the Baptistery. “What meaning can it have?” asked Miss Edwardes scornfully, after having watched the pageant with un- conscious interest. “'They’ve gone to bless the fonts in the Baptistery,” replied Perella literally. “IT know that. But what’s the good of blessing fonts when none of these people have baths once a life-time?” “They wouldn’t be any cleaner if the fonts weren’t blessed,”’ said Perella. “Oh, yes they would. Of course I’m talking sym- bolically. You only have to preach hygiene with the same fervour as you do mystical theology.” “You'd miss all this picturesqueness and colour—and ~ spirituality—even though you mayn’t believe in it,” said Perella. Amelia Edwardes sniffed. She had met reaction- aries like Perella before. People like her would con- demn their fellow-creatures to die of ague in rotten, moss-sodden, thatched cottages, just because they looked so pretty. Perella, no great arguer, lent a meek ear, but kept a keen eye on the happenings in front of her. ‘They were interesting. A ladder was brought up to the car, and a man ordinary to view, but the most important and nerve-racked being there that PERELLA 61 day, mounted it to secure the wires; for if the burning of the car should fail, grievous were the hopes of Tus- cany, to say nothing of the man himself, execrated by the populace, going without payment. In fiercer and more resolute times, his unskilful predecessors were put to death. And while he was nervously employed the stately procession returned to the Duomo. The hour of noon approached. Professor Gayton squeezed behind the chairs and touched Perella’s shoul- der. She turned up a smiling and grateful face. She felt it characteristic of him to leave all these important people and raise her, as it were, out of her own insig- nificance. “Keep your eyes on the door,” said he. On the first stroke of twelve there whizzed from the west door along the wires, a silver dove with a train of flame, lit at the High Altar from the sacred fire brought from the Holy Land six hundred years ago. It flew across the Piazza straight into the heart of the car, and then like a flash made its return journey. In one in- stant the car became a bedevilment of fireworks and smoke. The vast multitude yelled with joy. The bells in the great belfry clanged a deafening triumph. The car thundered like a battle. The scene shimmered before Perella’s eyes as an apotheosis of human rapture. “Damned silly,” said the young lady from Girton. Perella awakened. “It isn’t,” she cried, indignantly. “It’s lovely !” The company on the balcony waited for the melting of the crowd. The last squib in the car exploded all alone, by quaint way of anti-climax. The four white oxen were harnessed to the car for the completion of their year’s work. And the proprietor of the balcony handed round a tray of glasses of vermouth which they drank in the salon. Anthony came to Perella’s side, 3 62 PERELLA glowing with enthusiasm. Childish the show, of course, but beautiful, like all legend and the survival of legend. There were times when it was good for the soul to be a child and think and not to put away childish things, in spite of the good St. Paul—or was it St. Peter? He thought it was Paul, because Peter, being a married man, was more human. Silvester Gayton, hearing him, advanced a nervous step or two. “So glad you appreciated it. So glad. So very glad.” Perella was overjoyed. At last Anthony had won the Professor’s heart. Now all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. “I wish I’d been sitting next to you,” said he. “So do I,” said Perella. “Never mind. We felt everything the same. And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?” Two minds with but a single thought! Two hearts that beat as one! (Vide a funny old play of the long ago.) Of course that was the main thing. Perella nodded at him with shy brightness. The world transcended her imagined possibilities of bestness on that remarkable day. She discovered that the Professor had invited them all to lunch at a restau- rant. At Betti’s she lost sense of time and space until she found herself sitting at a round table between Dr. Edwardes and Haddo Thwaites. Anthony across the table sped her a wry glance, as though to say he was still on duty. She responded with a little sense of proprietorship. On occasion, discipline was good for young men. There followed a miracle of a meal. Young women brought up in back bedrooms by shaggy, out-at-elbows — members of the Fuddlers’ Club, and then thrust out into —_— ee eee ee ee ee _—— bee ie, rw oe ee a ee a ee ae PERELLA 63 the world to fend for themselves on sixty pounds a year, seldom eat in lordly banqueting houses. They also sel- dom have as luncheon neighbours the Head of a Cam- bridge House, and an eminent sculptor. But for the happiness racing through her veins and going to her head like wine, she would have felt the most frightened insignificant atom on earth. And lo! the jovial artist, though flanked on the other side by the latest product of Girton intelligence, began to talk to her as if he had known her, not all her life, but all his—which was con- siderably longer. And he knew her master at Chel- sea, a personage stern and aloof, whom he alluded to as Binkie though his name was Cochrane, and many of his Chelsea contemporaries; and he had fraternized with her father at the Savage Club of which he was a mem- ber. He told her stories which made her laugh; he de- murely stuffed Miss Edwardes’ Economics full of squibs, and at the right moment exploded them, as the Dove did those lurking in the Carro. 'The lady, as she was reading for the Political Essay Tripos, grew angry. He, a Cambridge man, made her angrier, by bewailing the fact that the University seemed to have Triposes for everything—Cabbage Planting, Tripe Dressing, As- sassination. With regard to the last, he deplored the passing away of the old order of seniority. The Senior Assassin of his year—what a distinction! Amelia Ed- wardes gazed fishily at him for a second or two, and her eyes said: “You poor fool,” and she went on with her food, not without commendable gluttony. Thwaitee caught Perella’s eye and laughed, and, after a while, entered into controversy with the courteously dogmatic Master, and upheld Perella and himself as brother artists inseparably leagued to fight materialism in the sacred cause of Art. Her pulses throbbed. People like Haddo Thwaites 64 PERELLA were her people. Afier all, she was a child of a mag- nificent reprobate and a half-remembered mother of un- known Italian ancestry. And across the table was An- thony, on his best behaviour, knowing, shrewd fellow, that his worth was being tested by his timid yet power- ful little host, conversing in debonair fashion with the two Edwardes ladies, mother and daughter, but all the time pricking an envious ear to the robust and laugh- ing talk of Haddo Thwaites. He, too, was of her own people; the people who could see and feel and under- stand all in a flash. She conceded to the Edwardes folk an important place in the intellectual sphere. But that sphere would never be hers. Sociology as formu- lated crudely by Amelia Edwardes, and subtly, and in- deed, humorously, by the young lady’s father—for the progressive, non-clerical Master of a great College must necessarily have the charm and the quick touch upon life of the accomplished man of the world—was as mean- ingless to her half-educated mind as the technical en- gineering details of a battleship. As for Mrs. Ed- wardes, she seemed to be nothing but a Hotel Register of Academic personalities, without any other obvious reason for existence. No. ‘They were not her peo- ple. She belonged to the big, generous sculptor, to the quick and impulsive Anthony. . . . Yes, and to the shy, antediluvian boy of a bald-headed professor who knew all that there was to be known about beauty. About three o’clock on that magical April afternoon, Perella and Anthony found themselves happy wander- ers in the streets of Florence. He threw his arm round her shoulders in a transient grip. “Thank God I’ve got you to myself at last!” She laughed. “I think we’ve behaved ourselves very nicely.” PERELLA 65 “Not much merit in your behaving nicely, Perella, my Conscience,” said he. ‘It’s I who have been noble.” “Let us find a site for a statue for you. It'll be something to do,” said Perella. ““You’re two foot nothing and you weigh about three pennyweights, and you’re the only really adorable thing I’ve come across in my devastated life. Where the blazes can we go so that I can tell you exactly what I mean?” “There’s quite a respectable salon in the Pension Toselli,” said Perella. “There is also the Boboli Garden where there are foun- tains and statues and all the marvels of spring. And here’s a chariot especially sent down from Heaven for us by the goddess.” He held up an arresting hand. “Strip the horse-hide off them, and you’ll find a pair of doves and the young bandit on the box has wings un- der his jacket, and his whip is only a camouflaged bow.” They entered the chariot. ‘The journey to Cythera began. He put his arm around her. “T had an idea when I first sat down by you in that place of abomination, that you had come straight out of a fairy tale.” In the welter of her pride and her humility she whis- pered: | “Why? I don’t seem to be of much account.” “You're a sensitive flame, my dear, labouring under the delusion that you’re a woman.” His arm gripped her little body tighter. His free hand caught her chin. In her eyes was the tragic look of the most radiantly happy woman who, for the first time, gives herself. He kissed her in the open streets of Florence. Little of importance remained to be said in the Bo- boli Garden. — PART II ANTHONY CHAPTER V For a young Orlando with scant heritage, Anthony Blake found life exceedingly pleasant. He had fallen in love with an elfin thing responsive to any chord he cared to strike, yet reserving in the depths of her all kinds of delicious and delicate mysteries which, he knew, she would shyly, gradually, yet never completely reveal during a life-time. He was an honest youth, and a poet in his way. It did not occur to him that his dainty lady had made unconditional surrender on the first magical night of their meeting. In his masculine way he gave never a thought to her half-starved and a-hungered emotions. In the days of his prosperity he had been on the modern hail-fellow-well-met terms with a hundred young females of his class. Some were good friends whose disconcerting frankness precluded senti- mental relations. Others, with a frankness equally dis- concerting, offered themselves to him—they were his for the marrying—and when he declined, gave him to un- derstand that he was rather an ass, but bore no further malice. Living cleanly (for all that mattered), lov- ing the bubbles of life in healthy fashion, he passed through the galaxy of nymphs unscathed. ‘Time to marry when he was thirty, by which time he would find the one and only girl in the world. He argued it out once with his eldest sister, Gloria, who had up her sleeve, so to speak, a desirable and de- siring damsel. He would live, said he, all being well, till he was at least seventy. Married at thirty, he would have forty years to live with the same woman, supposing for the sake of argument she was as tough as himself. Well, didn’t the dear thing see that he 66 a a e ANTHONY 67 wasn’t going to gamble away his existence except on a certainty? On the one hand, he refused to go bald- headed for a girl who obviously didn’t care a hang for him, but who might marry him on account of the posi- tion he could offer ; and, on the other, young women who threw themselves at his head made him positively sick. If social law allowed the trial trip, all would be well. At the end of a year or so, if it didn’t work it would be, on both sides, “Good-bye, old thing. Sorry. Bet- ter luck next time.” And so da capo. All might be exceedingly well. He would go so far as to say that it might be a succession of fascinating experiences up to the various snag-times. But no. All these young things expected you to take them on—on sight—for forty years. It couldn’t be done. Of course, there were such things as divorces—but those were beastly. You didn’t marry a girl with the mirage of divorce shimmering behind the parson in his white surplice. Forty years! It took a lot of thinking about. Thus Anthony, passim. Said Gloria, a comfortable lady, in love with life: “T was engaged to Freddie after a three weeks’ ac- quaintance, and married him after seven.” “And look at the poor devil now!” exulted Anthony. Of course, said he, she had sat up and begged for it. Her concerns were beside the question. His own were under discussion. Did she know her Rabelais? No. Did Freddie? She replied that modern Major- Generals with their hands full of armies and wives hadn’t time to fool about with stuffy old French classics. “If only he had occupied the seven weeks you talk about,” said he, “in studying the arguments between Pantagruel and Panurge on the advisability of Pan- urge marrying, you'd be having a very thin time now, my dear.” 68 PERELLA Heart-whole, his head a medley of delights over ma- terial and spiritual things, from broiled lobster to Michael Angelo, he arrived in Florence, sat down at the dreadful Toselli table, and there, next to him, was a tiny something in a wisp of an old mauve frock with a sensitive little face and adorable little hands, and a pair of quiet dark eyes, which was like nothing he had seen or thought of in the world before. . . . He remembered her first utterance—in answer to his question if she was English. “Yes, of course.” The dainty music of it! And her shy woodland ways! He disdained the thought, almost the knowledge, that she had spent her life in back bedrooms overlooking bricks and mortar. And her name—Perella—it might be the name of a bird. There was, indeed, something bird-like about her. ‘And all a wonder and a wild desire.” What damned useful people poets were! Anthony was in love, as much as a healthy and poet- ical and artistic young man can be. He discovered new beauties and reticences and delicate veins of hu- mour ‘and wisdom in Perella day by day. When, in pursuit of his making crayon portraits of the opulent, he was not retained to lunch, they often met for their midday meal in a haunt remote from the atmosphere of austere decay of the Pension Toselli. This was a res- taurant running through the cellars of a house or two. You dived off the pavement into a dark hole, passed - hissing, steaming, bubbling pots and pans, presided over by white-capped cook and myrmidons, and emerged into yellow-washed vaults furnished with ta- bles and rough appurtenances, and adorned with flam- ing posters. ‘The food was good, the wine was cheap, ANTHONY 69 and the company of endless variegation. To pay twice over for a meal was sinfully wasteful, but allur- ingly extravagant. They ate coarse dainties such as Madame Toselli would not dare offer to her genteel guests, and smoked between mouthfuls, a joy forbidden by the stern etiquette of the Pension. Indeed, the Bra- bazon ladies manifested displeasure if anyone lit a ciga- rette before the last woolly mouthful of the last wizened apple was eaten, and only tolerated the smell of tobacco for the few moments necessary for the consumption of their tepid coffee. Here, on the other hand, at Fra- tello’s, was freedom of body and speech. They could talk as loud as their neighbours—louder, if they were wise—for then they had the chance of hearing each other across the table. Now and then Anthony brought his friend, Charlie Dent, a fresh and pleasant youth who, knowing the be- trothed relations of the pair, treated Perella with a gay deference which pleased her mightily. Now and again, too, Perella brought Monica Despard, a vague girl who had been a fellow-student in Chelsea, and whom she had run across in Florence, vaguely continuing her art studies. Once or twice Charlie Dent entertained them at Betti’s, and took them afterwards to his queer apart- ment in order to feast their eyes on his collection of Roman coins. Perella, so long as she was with An- thony, would have gazed with rapture on a collection of skeleton ribs of beef, and been perfectly happy; but Anthony, in his masterful way, consigned Roman coins to Hades, strummed the newest airs from Musical Com- edy on the piano, and turned the scientific gathering into a vocal orgy. ‘Then they walked home together loverwise. “Anthony dear, will you always care for me like this??? 70 PERELLA All the grim palaces of Florence which had listened to lovers’ impassioned vows for centuries, heard her and smiled cynically. They were engaged. He bought her a ring—an ex- quisite onyx intaglio set in a thin rim of gold. But the engagement, they decided, should not be announced, in view of its prospective inordinate length. The Pen- sion Toselli must be kept in abysmal ignorance, where- fore Perella wore the ring on any old finger except the one of significance. Their ambitions were modest: a little Montparnasse flat in Paris, a bungalow on the river, within easy reach of London, a handy little car, and a faithful, hard-working Italian cook who would follow them everywhere. 'There would be studios in both places where they would work, one at each end. Perella’s copying drudgery would be over. She would paint figures from the live model, and make much money; while he would portrait himself mto celebrity. What could be wrong with the plan? ‘They furnished the flat and the bungalow twice over with treasures seen through the windows of the antique shops of Florence the Beautiful. Anthony wrote to his sister Gloria a letter of extraor- dinary length and conscientious rhapsody, to which she replied by telegram: ‘Dear silly ass!” This made him very angry; for he had minutely ex- plained that, though Perella would marry him to- morrow without thought of the future, such being her unique, unprecedented character, yet it would be wicked of him to take advantage of her ultra-human trust until he could provide adequately for her comfort. “I’m through with Gloria,” said he. “I thought she was my friend. I'll never speak to her again.” “You must have written her awful drivel, dear,” said Perella. ee ee ee Se ee a eee ee ee, ANTHONY gt “Oh, you sympathize with her, do you?” Perella nodded. ‘Do write to her again, and tell her I’m dying to meet her. I think she must be the dearest thing in the world.” ““She’s just a cat of no intelligence,” said Anthony. Thus Anthony and Perella. Meanwhile the days lengthened through the sweet of May into the flame of June. In July Florence began to grow uncomfortably warm, whereupon many residents fled to the imaginary climatic perfection of London or Paris, leaving the pen- cil of a young portraitist ready but idle. Now, things had happened. No one who, within three or four months, has established for himself a happy vogue in making portraits of the nobility and gentry of an important locality, can pass through such a social range like a ghost untouched by adventure. Anthony’s facile art, and his gay manner had carried him through Florentine society. He had made influ- ential friends. As he told Perella, he wallowed in ad- vice. | Among his main advisers were his first friend, Cor- nelius Adams, and the American lady, Mrs. Beatrice Ellison, whom he had met for a few fleeting minutes on his first entrance into Doney’s. Mrs. Ellison returned to Florence at the end of April. She lived in a historical villa on the way to Fiesole, where she entertained the select world of Italo- Anglo-American Florence. Thither in early May was Anthony conducted by Cornelius Adams and Charlie Dent. It was afternoon. On a marble loggia, south of as- pect, from which could be seen through soft blue mist, the fairy cupolas and towers of Florence, tea was being served to an elegant company. Dissemble the lower (2 PERELLA parts of ladies in sweeping trains, accentuate those of men by parti-coloured trunk-hose, substitute cool silver flagons for china tea-cups, and there might have been seated Pamfilo and Filostrato and Dioneo and Pam- pinea and Filomena and Elisa, the immortally delect- able idlers of the Decameron. The analogy was Anthony’s in talk with his hostess. The conceit pleased her, for she had gaiety and imagi- nation. She declared that she must inaugurate a series of symposia on Boccaccian lines, one story per sympo- sium. “But where,” bewailed Anthony, “are the exquisite amateur tellers of stories? All that—such is the mod- ern spirit of commercialism—has fallen into profes- sional hands—and the modern professional wouldn’t dream of giving out his stories except at his market rate of so much per thousand words.” ‘What would you suggest then?” smiled the lady, for Anthony was one of the fortunate youths on whom ladies smiled instinctively. “‘A perfect communion of chosen souls, where speech would be forbidden. You would be much happier— wouldn’t you?—if, instead of being bored to death by me whom you’re so indulgent as to talk to, you could sit just there and look at the black cypresses against the blue sky, and the shimmering city, and know that beside you someone sympathetic was feeling exactly the same things and was saving you the worry of po- lite conversation.” “Tt sounds lovely,” she laughed, “but I’m afraid in modern Italy it wouldn’t work. The Fascisti would get to hear of it, and, as they couldn’t conceive such a party was not under the influence of drugs, they’d arrest us all for dreadful people trafficking in co- caine.” ANTHONY (3 Anthony left behind him a favourable impression, and carried away, in a jubilant head, a commission to make a portrait of his hostess, in her setting on the loggia, as one of the Queens of the Decameron. A commission from Beatrice Ellison would have flattered any young and ambitious artist. Not only was she a beautiful woman, but also one of those aris- tocratic ladies to whom Americans, secretly hating their self-condemnation to Main Street democracy, point with pride and unquestioned justification as the finest product of modern civilization. With the ripe experience of the world which a woman has gathered by her early forties, she was at the height of her in- fluence and charm. Like most women of her class, she devoted certain pains to the preservation of her youth, whereby she remained young in health and looks and enjoyment of life. She reigned somewhat as a queen in Florence, holding a position in the so- cial world analogous to that of Silvester Gayton in the world of Art and Letters. ‘The two were friends; but when they met, it was generally in pleasant quietude. Anthony Blake made the most graceful little fin- ished sketch of Mrs. Ellison. The lady proclaimed her delight. Her court paid tribute to the artist. In her pose he had divined the irony of her languor and the truth of her authority. Without using colour he had, by some trick of legerdemain, conveyed the sense of the blueness of her eyes and the fresh pink of complexion beneath the mass of black hair. Anthony took rank, at once, among the illuminati who formed the nucleus, the Household, as it were, of the court of Beatrice Ellison. His position, within modest lim- its, was honourably lucrative. It was also one of great social value; for, by its virtue, exclusive doors were thrown open to him. He began, once more, to 74 PERELLA move among the great and wealthy. He would apolo- gize now and then to Perella for apparent neglect. “Often I’m bored to tears, bird of my soul,” said he one day over lunch in the cellar restaurant; “but it’s the only way to establish my connection. People don’t come to a young man who lives on the top of an inaccessible mountain or at the bottom of a coal mine, begging him, for God’s sake, to paint their portraits. He must be there on the spot, in the midst of them, so that a fellow happening to catch sight of him says: ‘Hullo, that’s young Blake who did Jones’s wife so well. I wonder whether he’d do mine. By George! I'll ask him. And he asks, and young Blake puts on dog and condescends to take the order and sticks the money in the savings-bank against the day when he can carry off Perella for a honeymoon in a bungalow on the Thames. 'That’s how it’s done.” And Perella, dazzled by his magnificent prospects, agreed that nothing could be better done by the best of all possible lovers. ‘‘You’re such a miracle,” said he. “So big in your tininess. You never reproach me for leaving you so much to yourself, and you scorn jealousy.” She replied, with one of her elfin smiles: “I’m too happy to be jealous. But sometimes I wonder.” “What?” ‘““How you can leave princesses in palaces for Cin- derella in a kitchen.” “Cinderella’s going to have a Taj-Mahal palace of her very own, and wear nothing but diamond slippers.” A most comforting assurance. It made the cheap Chianti, which he poured into her glass from the vast, long-necked fiasco swinging in its cradle, glow with the fire of Love and Rubies consummating their union. ANTHONY 15 Mrs. Ellison commissioned a second portrait—just a head and shoulders—a sketch for her daughter Emilia, a girl of eighteen who was taking a course of Theoretic Motherhood at a university in Minnesota. “This time make me respectable. The other was too Decameronian to send to a girl of a lamentably critical temperament.” One morning while she was sitting to him, there drove up Silvester Gayton, in his rattling old car. Invited to lunch, he had arrived early, so as to enjoy the coolness of the country air. He would not inter- rupt the sitting, said he, for worlds. He would walk the grounds. Anthony laughingly wiped the chalk from his hands. By no means; Mrs. Ellison was al- ready tired. He would come again, his time being always at her gracious disposal. But the lady had planned that the young artist should stay for lunch. Her word, both in and out of her own house, was law. She could sit for another half-hour, during which her dear Silvester could rest just there—she waved to a neighbouring seat—and when he was sick of the sight of his eternal Florence in the blue distance, he could occupy himself in watching a work of art in process of creation. Silvester put down his bowler hat and drew off his grey suéde gloves, and sat on his appoimted chair just behind the artist. “The old school and the new school—and—what am I? the m-between school. It’s rather interesting,” said the lady. “There’s only one school, dear Beatrice, don’t you think?” he said diffidently, “and that is the True school. I don’t see much difference in method between the sketches of the quattro-centisti and that of our friend heres. J." 16 PERELLA Anthony flushed red, and turned quickly round. “IT know what you mean, sir. You’re not com- paring my work in value to the old people—it’s just the method. But that’s a tremendous compli- ment.” | “Well,” returned the Professor, rather pleased, “I did intend to be agreeable. It’s always nice to be that and truthful at the same time. All I meant was that you had the simple desire to draw a thing as you see it, and the gift of the free line in order to do it. So you belong to the one and only school, founded by the first primitive man who scratched the outline of a reindeer on the walls of his cave. You know,” he turned to Mrs. Ellison, “some of these cave drawings are tremendous works of art. The reindeer live.” Beatrice Ellison smiled. “According to you, that’s the only criterion—Life.” “Yes, my dear,” said the Professor, bending for- ward; “‘you can test everything by it. Even a Stilton cheese.” The drawing progressed. After a while, Anthony rose and stuck his drawing on his chair, and looked at it from a distance. “That’s all I can do for to-day. The time comes when one doesn’t know whether one sees too much or too little.” Mrs. Ellison murmured admiration of the likeness. Silvester Gayton peered at it through his thick lenses. “Quite good. Yes, quite good. But’—he bent a thumb—“if you’ll pardon my venturing to criticize, don’t you think that shadow on the cheek is a bit heavy? A question of values. A thing like this should give the impression of being done in an inspired instant. Nobody should be conscious of the agony and sweat that goes to it.” ANTHONY V7 Anthony nodded, looking anxiously at his drawing. Mrs. Ellison laughed. “Professor Gayton’s nothing if not a Counsellor of Perfection.” Anthony flashed in his charming way. “Has there ever been a Teacher in this world who wasn’t?” Lunch-time approached. Ten minutes for washing of hands and powdering of noses, said the hostess. She disappeared. ‘The men went together into the house. “I’m very grateful to you for your kindness, sir,” said Anthony. After lunch Mrs. Ellison left them alone for a while. She knew her Silvester and what fruits a discreet whis- per in his ear would bear. This time Anthony had made a favourable impression. He had conducted himself with deference and humility—no longer the young man knowing most things and on the eve of knowing all that were left, who had at first driven the sensitive Professor far back into his shell. The com- pass needle, carefully set by Mrs. Ellison at the young man’s prospects, remained steady. “Your work is quite good and interesting,” said Silvester Gayton, after preliminary talk. “But have you thought what it will lead to? You can’t go on making crayon portraits all your life-time.” Anthony supposed he couldn’t. But what would the Professor suggest? “The obvious career for a portraitist is that of a painter.” “T wish to goodness I could paint,” cried Anthony. “But when I get a brush in my hands, it’s such a clumsy thing that I can only make a beastly mess. Of course, I know that if I went into a studio in Paris, 78 PERELLA say, and threw my heart into painting, I’d get the hang of it. It’s really a matter of technique. Pencil or brush—after all—well But I can’t afford a couple of unprofitable years. Here I am beginning to make a lot of money in a modest way.” “Quite so—quite so. But soon you'll exhaust your public—numerically, I mean, of course. And then?” That was the devil of it. The thought had worried Anthony exceedingly every night for five minutes be- fore he went to sleep, and for five minutes between awakening and jumping impatiently out of bed. The wise professor counselled the two years’ sacri- fice in Paris. Anthony urged the possibility of fame and fortune from black and white. “Pardon me, my dear Mr. Blake,” said Gayton, “but why do you clamour for fame and fortune so soon? Believe me, there’s the greatest joy in waiting, if faith and hope are strong enough.” Anthony gave meek assent. He realized somewhat ruefully, as many millions of men have done, that the best advice in the world has been given on insufficient data, and therefore, logically, is valueless. Now, if he had told him about Perella! But he couldn’t bring in Perella, even though he knew that Gayton, depart- ing from instinctive habit, had taken Perella under his special protection. A new and incomprehensible shyness inhibited reference to Perella. The timid little great man imposed himself on the habitual ir- reverence of his youth. He feared reproach, how- ever delicately veiled, for penniless impudence. He took it for granted that Gayton saw Perella, through his eyes, as a thing of elfin flame, not to be desecrated by vulgar breath. As they rose from table the Professor said: “T hope you don’t mind my prying into your private ANTHONY 19 affairs in this way, but—there’s my good friend, Halli- day Armstrong, originally, and now our dear hostess —I knew her husband, poor chap—much older than her, you know. . . . He was the greatest living au- thority on Italian stained glass, and that’s how I came to know him. Well—I’m afraid I’m getting mixed up. What I wanted to say was that two friends, Armstrong and Mrs. Ellison, have been responsible for my indiscretion—to say nothing of my opinion of the work of yours that I’ve seen.” Said Anthony, responsive to the elder man’s cour- tesy: “I’m only too fortunate in having you take any notice of me at all.” They joined Mrs. Ellison in the loggia, when coffee and liqueurs were served. “Has he given you sound advice?” she asked An- thony. “The wisest and the kindest,” replied the young man with a bow. A while afterwards she offered the artist another hour’s sitting. Silvester Gayton took his leave, one glove on and the other off, in the old-fashioned way, and his jacket closely buttoned. “You've won his heart; I’m so glad,” said Mrs. Elli- son. “It’s a heart of gold, but it takes some winning.” He started to draw, but presently threw down his crayon. The light was wrong. There were all sorts of shadows and conflicting tones. She must change the sitting to some room with a quiet, north light. She avowed herself too lazy to move. He could come, if he liked, to-morrow morning. Meanwhile, the drowsy afternoon lent itself to comfortable talk. She lay back in a cane chair, slim and graceful, and drew a cigarette from her case. He bent over her. with a lighted match. A little earnest pucker of her 80 PERELLA brows relaxed, and she looked up at him with a nod and a charming smile of thanks. Perhaps, for the first time, he looked upon her with a non-professional eye, and realized her as a very beautiful woman. “TI want to know more about you,” she said. “I don’t mean your pedigree, or even your past, however interestingly dreadful it may be—but your present and your ideas for the future. Does it bore you to talk about yourself?” He made the obvious modest reply. She laughed. “Tf I were doing penance for my sins, the last mor- tification I should dread would be boredom.” She gave him a lead. “What has my good Silvester to say?” They sat in the colonnaded marble loggia, a slant of sunshine across the far end, but they in secure cool shade. It was the blue and golden afternoon of early Italian summer. Away below dreamed the domes and towers of the city, man’s immortal handiwork con- secrated by the smile of God. On the loggia, every- thing seemed far away and delicate. A touch of the scent of magnolia was in the air, but the tree was not near enough to drench the senses. Far off too, a cicada made dainty music to his mate. A cowbell on the mountain above tinkled just perceptibly in the still air. From far away at the back of the house came now and then the notes of a man-servant singing, as every Italian must when he is finding joy in his work. All the horns of Elfland were faintly blowing. The young man living, who, invited in such conditions by a beautiful lady, near and yet remote, to make the very most and best of himself, does not respond, is a young man with no music in his soul, and, as the poet tells us, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and must not be trusted even to watch the tin can of a blind ANTHONY 81 man’s dog. As a tulip unfolds its heart to the sun, so did Anthony unfold his life to the Lady. .. . She listened intently, throwing in, here and there, a soft and humorous word. She had the great gift of making men—and women too—feel that, to her, they were the most important factors of the universe. Un- consciously he surrendered to her enchantment. Lit- tle Perella seemed far away, mingled somehow with the shimmer of temples, and the elusive perfumes of flow- ers and the far-flung music of fairy bells away up on the side of the scented mountain. Loyalty strove to wrest her from the ambient fairy- land and set her there on the loggia, warm and human, before the lady. But a curious fear froze loyalty into an inactive block; the intuitive fear of the man, ig- norant of being born to the love of many women, yet sensitive to their touch. Instinctively he knew that the hour was golden because the woman lazily holding him with her dark blue—here and there in shadow al- most violet—eyes, had willed its transmutation into gold. . . . She had lured him from the commonplace into talk of beauty and emotion and God knows what. He spoke, and she wove grace around his utterances. For the first time in his clean and careless life, he found himself under the spell of woman. Perella, an alien elf, would have broken a spell too sensuous to be broken. The butler came in with a jingle of silver and china on atray. Beatrice Ellison rose from her long chair. “T am dying for tea.” She busied herself with the dainty ceremony of the futile meal. The talk fell to common earth. At last, however, she said with a sigh: “JT suppose one of these days you, like the rest of you, will be mad to marry some flibbertigibbet of 82 PERELLA a modern girl, and you’ll wave your hand to all your friends—Bon soir la compagnie—and off you'll go. But if you’re a wise man, you’ll realize you’ve still half a dozen years of sense in front of you. Have a cu- cumber sandwich?” How could young man say: “Madam, I will not have a cucumber sandwich, because I have already the girl of my heart?” He laughed, in a silly sort of way, and accepted the sandwich. CHAPTER VI Tuat glowing afternoon set the date in Anthony’s life of a new set of influences; for, a few minutes after his Edenic eating of the cucumber sandwich, there drove up Cornelius Adams to tell and hear of plans for the approaching exodus from Florence. Mrs. Ellison put before her new guest the problem of the young man’s career. Anthony was flattered by hear- ing himself discussed, not only as a personage of im- portance, but as a joint possession for whom these two kind friends were responsible. Cornelius Adams drove him to Florence, saving him from the dusty return by the inconvenient vehicles of democracy. Anthony was one of those easy phi- losophers who accept discomfort with a tolerant smile, but luxury with whole-hearted delight. A good cigar between his lips, he lay back on the cushions, the King of ‘Tuscany. His host summed up the late discussion. ‘The three of us—Professor Gayton, Mrs. Ellison and my- self—are agreed upon one thing. You’re wasting your time here. The professor thinks you ought to paint. Mrs. Ellison thinks you ought to do some- thing, I don’t quite know what. I think you’ve got a special gift which you can use, for some years at any rate, to your great advantage. You want a field. I’m an American, and so, of course, I say New York. I know a hundred people there; Mrs. Ellison a thou- sand. 'There’s your chance.” ; A dazed young man sat by Perella’s side that eve- ning at the Pension Toselli dinner. They had been 83 84 PERELLA promoted to nearly the top of the long table. In fact, they sat next to the younger Miss Brabazon, on Madame Toselli’s left, their opposite neighbours be- ing the Grewsons, who flanked the elder Miss Brabazon on Madame Toselli’s right. Vague people in whom they took no interest filled the lower seats. Theirs, of course, was the honour of seniority, but the intimate talk of obscure position was a thing of the past. An- thony listened during most of the meal to an intri- cate tale concerning an ancestral Brabazon, belonging to the British Embassy in Paris, who arranged the Entente Cordiale between Monsieur Guizot and Lord Aberdeen when Sir Robert Peel formed his ministry in 1841. Ancestor Brabazon shone as Monsieur Guizot’s guiding star, and lit the stormy way to peace between the two countries when Lord Palmerston re- turned to office in 1846. “My great-grandfather, in his day, was considered the handsomest man in Europe. And the wittiest. He was an intimate friend of the Empress Eugénie. She said. to him one day when, as the French say, he had been engaged in conter fleurette to Her Majesty: ‘Ah, Monsieur Brabazon, if only I had been born twenty years earlier, who knows whether the History of Europe might not have been changed.’ And he replied with a sigh. ‘Ah, Madame, who can foretell the past?? I call that pure wit, don’t you?” “Attic, my dear lady, merum sal,” said Anthony. The Rev. Mr. Grewson leaned across the table, a facetious cleric. “I’m thinking of writing an article for the Quarterly Review entitled: ‘The Future: A Retrospect.’ ” The elder Miss Brabazon by his side, who had not been listening to her sister’s favourite tale, turned to him: ANTHONY 85 “But surely, Mr. Grewson, that’s a contradiction in terms !” “Yes, dear Miss Brabazon,” he replied, “but what a delicious contradiction.” Anthony wiped a moist brow—the air of the room, tight-shuttered against mosquitoes, was heavy—and whispered to Perella: ***T die, I faint, I fail,’ he quoted. “How can we get out of this dreadful place?” As very often happened, a friendly cinema sheltered them later from the intellectual debauchery of the Pension Toselli. They had acquired the habit of dis- regarding the forlorn entertainment provided, and us- ing the place as a private sitting-room. The worse the film and the emptier the house—their choice had become expert—the more did they find themselves at home. On this evening Anthony put before Perella the brand-new suggestion of his bid for fortune in America. She listened with a smile in her eyes and a queer little droop of the corner of her lips. America seemed desperately far away. ““You see, my dear,” said he; “old man Gayton’s perfectly right. There’s the future to look to. I can’t carry on at this game all my life, and I don’t see any great point in becoming a hack black-and- white man. It isn’t as if I were a comic chap, and would do humorous stuff—which pays, of course; but think of the dreadful strain of it, being funny every day, year in and year out, until one’s last breath, and then having people hanging around expecting you to breathe the last joke. No, that’s not my line. Frankly, am I funny?” “Only unconsciously,” said Perella. “That wipes out a means of livelihood, doesn’t it?” 86 PERELLA She agreed. But she was not convinced that the career of a black-and-white artist, a successful maga- zine illustrator, for instance, was one to be despised. “But I want money, my dear. Lots of money. Bankfuls of money,” he declared. “But is money so very important?” she ventured. “How can I give you your crystal castle with a golden throne in Rainbow Land without money?” Craving none of these monstrosities, Perella sighed. © “IY should be more than happy in our little bunga- low.” “With a neat little maid in white cap and apron. And you and I going about like those comic people we met at the Pension when we first came—the Oscar Merrydevils.” She laughed. ‘Basil Merrywethers.” “KE tutti quanti’”—he waved a hand. “Can you imagine me with a beastly collar over my coat, ham- mering up hen-pens and bee-sheds and pruning potato trees in our dear little patch of garden? Or driving you in our own little petrol can to the nearest village to buy scrag of mutton and tinned lobster and Bird’s custard powder? No, no, my fairy princess. Bun- galows are off. If you yearn for the river, and until I can decree you a Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome, let us think in terms of a dignified early Geor- gian house standing in its own grounds. Let us think, temporarily, in terms of terraces and peacocks.” Perella laughed again. “I’m all for peacocks.” “And the decoration of life. ‘Life is real and life is earnest’—but so is the drivelling existence of the inhumourous ant or the other survivors of my family burrowing somewhere in the unclean subterranean passages of the City of London. But life is meaning- less without colour and decoration. Peacocks are ANTHONY 87 just what we want. Do you know—we talk about a herd of cattle, a flock of sheep, a flight of wild duck, a covey of partridges, but—listen—isn’t it decorative? —a muster of peacocks. We’ll have a muster.” “It7ll cost a lot of money,” said Perella. “That’s the whole point. Money. Merely the means to decorate life. If I decided to go to America to buy you peacocks, what would you say?” She said nothing, fearful lest she should appear un- gracious. Her shoulder rubbed his in the semi- darkness. Her right hand lay in his warm and com- forting clasp, and with the thumb of her left she fiddled with the cameo ring which was the symbol of their troth. The surrender of her bungalow caused her a pang, that of a fibre suddenly severed; but she strove loyally to readjust her sum of values to the Georgian mansion. After all, he had passed his life among mus- ters of peacocks, and not, like herself, among sooty sparrows chirruping around the windows of back bed- rooms. But could she live up to the peacocks? Also, the period between the Pension Toselli and the Geor- gian terrace loomed a yawning gulf, indefinite, envel- oped in black and intimidating fog. If the gulf were to be crossed, hand in hand as they were now, she would be as bold as a lion, fearing no evil; indeed, a fine streak of instinct at the back of her mind suggested her possible leadership over here and there a dangerous pass where they must walk gropingly. But the more he talked in his young magniloquence, the less significant of atoms did she feel. Why he loved her, why he desired to enthrone her among rain- bow peacocks and diamonds she could not imagine. She would be content with so little, having so much. She sat unutterably happy, poignantly hurt, entirely baffled. Of all his ambitions she was the end. He 88 PERELLA made that flattermgly clear. Yet, after all, was it so flattering? She preferred herself, preferred his con- ception of her, as the little Perella of no account, to his imaginary apotheosis of an impossible Perella in impossible glory. Anyhow, and after all, she was flattered by the proclaimed end of his ambition. But the means to the end? ‘That was where her modest little soul felt the hurt. She counted for nothing. As far as she could gather from his picturesque dis- course, she would be left at the Pension Toselli, wait- ing until such time as he, having made sufficient money in America by drawing millionairess beauty from New York to Hollywood, should study portrait paint- ing seriously for a year or two, and then, having made his fortune as a great portrait painter, should stand on the terrace of the Georgian Mansion and beckon to her to come across the gulf. He gave her the impres- sion that, at a breathlessly awaited moment, he would send for her—dispatch a messenger on wires for her, somewhat after the fashion of the dove in the Scoppio del Carro. The mixed figure confused her. She strove to clear her mind of images and get to the solid and undecorated fact. Anthony proposed to go away for two years, for the advantage of them both. ‘Two years. The attuning of her mind to such an infinite chord of time made her head reel. After all, what could she say? Meanwhile Anthony continued his parable, uncon- scious, after the way of men, of the commentaries and ~ glosses and conjectural readings that occupied the soul of Perella. She said little or nothmg. He took for granted her acquiescence. It was only on their walk home under the June stars that he became aware of unusual silence, and now and then a little convulsive, almost reflex pressure on his arm. ANTHONY 89 “You haven’t yet told me what you think of the idea,” he said. “And, of course, it’s only an idea. If you don’t want me to go, wild Crcoesuses wouldn’t drag me.” Thus challenged, her conscience smote her. She had been sadly lacking in loyal sympathy. She clutched his arm. “Dear. Dear Anthony. Don’t you know that whatever you do must be right? How can I begin to advise you on these big things?” He slipped his arm round her and said tenderly: “You see, Perella mia, life isn’t all moonlight and the glimmer of stars. I wish to God it were. For that’s where you belong.” She protested. She was but a dull little moth flut- tering round the candle of happiness. said 144 PERELLA “You must have left Florence, of course. ... But it might have been forwarded.” And then the thought hit her like a hammer that, what with the shock of the news and her telegram to Anthony and the fluster over arranging the train- journey and getting a black dress and hat and stock- ings, and selecting and packing half her belongings and worrying Madame Toselli for change so that she could tip the earnest Giuseppe, she had forgotten to leave be- hind her a London address. All this, while thinking of Anthony, she told the sympathetic Gayton with an air of apologetic remorse. He patted her hand. What did it matter? Presently he questioned her, with some concern, about her prospects. What was she thinking of doing? “T’ll carry on just as usual.” “But this must make some difference to you—in spite of your little inheritance.” She smiled and explained ingenuously that, apart from her tiny private income, she had been earning her own living for the past three or four years. Her dear father couldn’t afford to keep a prodigal daughter and a house of his own. He tugged at his little moustache and looked gravely out of window; then turned and said: “IT never guessed you were such a valiant little lady.” | She flushed, for the Professor was not a man of vain words. ‘“‘When everybody’s kind to me and gives me work, I don’t see there’s much to be brave about.” **Ah—but when everybody isn’t?” said Silvester. “T don’t think that’ll ever happen,” she replied, with a dream in her eyes. “But if it does, my dear, if it ever should,” he said SILVESTER 145 in his diffident way, “do remember you’ve always got at least one friend.” She half turned, and laid light fingers on his knee. “After to-day I should be an ungrateful little wretch if I ever forgot.” “Then that’s all right, a contract made,” said he hastily, like any undergraduate or subaltern betrayed into a shameful path of sentiment. He made abrupt change. “Do you like copying?” “Oh, yes!” “Why p> She meditated for a moment or two, and then an- swered: “Don’t you think it’s rather wonderful to live for weeks in the reflection of a great soul, and to try to get at his spiritual message, and when you step back and look at what you’ve done, to try to guess what he would think of it? I know what I say must seem very silly to you, Professor,” she added, after a pause, “but I do really feel something like that.” He nodded. ‘That’s more or less how I feel when I look at masterpieces. WhatI should feelif I could copy them, like you, I don’t know. I tried to be a painter once, but it was no good. I can only see pictures and tell people what I see. Good Lord! Here we are.” The taxi drew up before the Battersea Mansions. They mounted to the flat. The maid had set out, daintily, a modest meal in the one sitting-room—a cold tongue and salad and cold fruit-pie. Funeral baked meats may be deprecated as cynical, but the poor hu- man system, after the strain of burial rites, instinctively craves sustenance. Perella cast a hungry glance at the table, pleasantly anticipating satisfaction. She pointed, hospitably : 146 PERELLA “Tf you will stay to lunch, Professor . . . it’s one o’clock. near: price said he, pulling out his watch. ‘So it is. . . . You’re very kind. But—er—Mrs. Annaway —i aoe want to intrude. . . .” “You can’t help knowing,” said Perella, with a thrill of audacity, “what a comfort and support to her it would be if you stayed.” He pulled off his black gloves, and stuffed them into the tails of his morning-coat. “You’ve got a funny way of picking the best bits out of the back of people’s minds. Of course I'll stay, my dear child. . . . Of course.” Intuitively knowing that all traces of Caroline’s nocturnal occupation would be swept away, she said: “Come into my father’s study.” It was the first time that she had entered, since her arrival, the once nightmare room of slovenly untidiness. She beheld a miracle of order. It was a fair-sized room, the originally projected dining-room of the flat. The same remembered deal book-cases lined it, but instead of the old dusty, higgledy-piggledy disarray of books, there reigned the decorum of a classified library. The leather arm-chair whose seat, from her childhood’s days, had ever shown grey stuffing and a glint of steel spring, when it was not heaped with newspapers and periodicals and dog’s-eared manuscript, now gleamed free in the freshness of new upholstery. ‘The long Cromwellian table at which he always worked, once a scandalous foot-high horror of papers and pipes and dirty gloves, booksellers’ catalogues, cigar-ash, unanswered letters, bills—mountains of them—all surmounted by a drunk- enly inclined empty tumbler or two smelling villain- ously of whisky, the end of a forgotten sock suspender dangling in the midst of the mass, and a filthily blotted SILVESTER 14:7 pad reserving the only space at which a man could put paper to write, now displayed the stern and coquettish order of the desk of a Cabinet Minister, supervised by his official private secretary. Here, too, was seen the masterful hand of Caroline. Gayton’s bookish man’s instinct took him round the shelves. They were mainly filled with review copies of books of every kind of subject. One or two he took from their places and glanced through. Perella said shyly: “I wonder if you would like to have any little thing of his as a memento?” Thus invited, he cast a courteous glance around, touched a discoloured ivory paper-knife, and smiled. *’This looks like an old friend.” She put it into his hand. “Perhaps the oldest thing of his I can remember. He told me I cut my teeth on it.” “But ” he began to protest. *“No——” she interrupted, and looked at him. He yielded. “It’ll be all the more precious to me, my dear,” said he, with a little formal bow. The more slowly driven pair arrived. They sat down to lunch. The talk, led by Fanshawe into channels of contemporary art and literature, lay mainly between the two men. The meal over, Fan- shawe drew the will from his pocket, and, putting on a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, read it aloud. The testator bequeathed the contents of the library and the spare bedroom, as they should stand at the time of his death, to his daughter, Perella; the remainder of the contents of the flat to Caroline Langton, his devoted companion. ‘The residue of his estate, after necessary deductions made, to be divided equally between the 148 PERELLA two women. Fanshawe was appointed sole executor. Perella broke the inevitable awkward silence that followed. “Was that your idea, Mr. Fanshawe, or my father’s?” “We hammered it out together, Miss Annaway,” he replied, rather coldly. “It was not very easy to make aman of your father’s temperament sit down and do a thing like this.’ He tapped the paper. “Knowing his circumstances I thought I was acting for the best.” “I’m sure you were,” cried Perella. ‘But don’t you see, it’s awfully unfair?” Three startled and pained people looked at the tiny figure standing erect in the midst of them. “In what way?” asked Fanshawe. She flashed round on him. “Why should I have any of the furniture? I left the flat a perfect pig-stye. My fault. She has turned it into a place of beauty—look at 1t—and she made my dear father very happy—and I don’t care for wills or lawyers or law or anything a all hers, and ’m not going to take it away from her.” Then, of course, the silly woman, Caroline, began to cry through sheer reaction, and Perella went over to comfort her. Whereupon the two men retired to the library in order to talk common-sense. “‘Of course she can do what she likes when probate is granted,” said Fanshawe. “A deed of gift to regular- ize matters. But the young lady is somewhat quixotic and absurd.” “JT think she’s a splendid little girl,” said Gayton, lighting a cigarette. “I wouldn’t check her splendid- ness for anything in the world.” The worried Fanshawe shrugged his shoulders and replied: SILVESTER 149 “T’ve only seen her once before, when she was a child.” “‘Ah—well—yes,” said Gayton. “But, perhaps she has grown since then.” Like Pilate, Fanshawe washed his hands. Anyhow, it was none of his business. The whole affair was an infernal nuisance. The greatest curse of civilization was the parasitic growth of altruism on a man’s self- consciousness. Primitive man didn’t care an auroch’s tooth for his neighbour’s womankind—unless he wanted to haul them by the hair of their heads into his own cave. From such an idea he, Fanshawe, a married man with eight girl children, shrank with the repugnance of satiety. Why the devil should he have worried about these women? For years Annaway, sodden with drink, had been as difficult to catch as a will-o’-the-wisp over a swamp; but, of course, when fastened down, could do things like nobody else; and he had turned his edi- torial hair prematurely grey, and he had wished the fellow comfortably dead and done with; then, lo and behold! there had come a change, and the said fellow gave him no trouble at all, and was more brilliant than ever, so that he, idiot that he was, began to take an interest in him as a human being, to be followed by this dreadful and inescapable nemesis of altruism. ““Now that you’ve got all that off your chest, my dear Fanshawe,” said Silvester Gayton in his precise and pedantic accents, “don’t you think you might laugh, by way of reaction?” And Fanshawe laughed. | “TI suppose we’re all damned fools without knowing why.” “And perhaps, my dear fellow,” said Gayton, “the damneder fools we are, the greater is our state of grace.” 150 PERELLA “Grace be hanged,” said Fanshawe. “All I want is bread and butter for an idiotically miscreated family.” He pulled out his watch. “Good God!” he cried. ‘’The owner’s coming on board at three, and I’ve barely time to meet him at the top of the gangway steps. Hell! what a life! This poor thing thinks himself God —he’s obese enough for a Burmese deity—and expects us all—me, the editor of the Daily Millionograph, to bow down and worship him, and, my dear Gayton, he’s the most disastrous, colossal ass stuffed with straw and wind that your beastly sentimental altruistic world has ever seen. But I’ve got to secure bread and butter for my horrid brood. Good-bye, my friend. Con- tinue your beautiful life on the peaks of philosophic celibacy, and don’t care a damn about anybody or any- thing. If only I can find a taxi!” He dashed, Gayton following, into the sitting-room, where the two young women sat, more or less sedate and composed, and took hurried leave. **How little we know one another,” said Gayton, after the flat door had slammed behind him. “I should never have suspected such vehemence from our melancholy editor.” “Tf he wasn’t vehement—really—hbeneath the sur- face—why should he have done all this for us?” asked Perella. “TY believe human beings are capable of anything good when they’re put to it,” he said. Well, there was the end of the funeral and the baked meats and the ceremony. Gayton went off on his own affairs. He was due in the Viale Milton at the end of the week. Perella must let him know when she re- turned to Florence. In the meantime, The Atheneum would always find him. He shook hands, and bowed in SILVESTER 151 an old-fashioned formal fashion. To Perella, who showed him to the flat door, he said: “Courage, my dear, courage. Always courage.” During the next day or two the two women sat on a committee of Ways and Means. Fanshawe, by letter, reported no debts save for current modest weekly bills, and assets to the amount of about two thousand pounds cash balance at the bank. This vast fortune took Perella’s breath away. She remembered the time when horrid people used to stand at the door and, in malev- olently chosen language, vainly demand instant pay- ment. “But how can it be?” she asked Caroline. “IT suppose I persuaded him to earn more and spend less.” “You were his Guardian Angel.” “And yet I couldn’t stop him going off like that— at fifty,” said Caroline mournfully. The immediate future gradually pieced itself out like the pattern of a puzzle. Caroline, with fresh capital, would return to the Chelsea light-luncheon and tea-shop which she had been running with another woman, and in which she had sold her share when Annaway had caught her up, eagle-wise, to his Battersea eyrie. The business was paying satisfactorily. Her ex-partner, Miss Pritchard, a genius in her way, had made the place famous for CHufs Chicago, always served on a plate, with dainty finger-napkin and roll and butter, the said dish being presented in a two-handled bouillon cup, consisting of a raw egg beaten up with brandy and a few other esoteric and alcoholic subtleties. Perella, un- trained in abstract laws of morality, thought it a splendid idea. How often had she craved a little pick- me-up after a hard morning’s work, and not known how 152 PERELLA to get it! On the other hand, she was vaguely aware of licensing laws. Was there no danger? Caroline declared that the excise people hadn’t a leg to stand on. If they were free to provide sole aw vin blanc, or brandy butter for Christmas pudding—an incontest- able proposition—why should a flavouring of brandy be prohibited with raw eggs? Perella’s admiration of Caroline swelled daily. She learned her artless history. She came from Bilston, unattractive town, where her father was a Don Juan- esque clerk in a factory, and her mother, the acid daughter of a Wesleyan minister who lived under the right or wrong impression that she had married be- neath her. Caroline had escaped from an unhappy household to join the chorus ranks of a touring musical comedy company. Cast jetsam in London, a girl with a certain beauty of face and figure, she had become an artist’s model. Her parents, finding common ground for renunciation of actress daughter in Bilston Non- conformist respectability, renounced her. She had her adventures, like any other, including marriage with a man—a so-called financier met in a sculptor’s studio— who beat her and left her stranded and disappeared for ever into eternity. Possibly he might have been killed in the war. She didn’t know. Then there was a seri- ous liaison for a few years with a man who really was killed and left her the little money which she had in- vested in the Pritchard tea-shop. And then came Annaway, the real love of her life. “T suppose the good folks of Bilston are right in call- ing me an immoral woman,” she said, “but things have been against me and I’ve done my best. I don’t think I’ve done wilful harm to any human being.” “You’re a very brave dear,” said Perella. “And if yow’re not able to keep on the flat I’ll be heart-broken.” SILVESTER 153 Telegrams—her lean purse quivered at the expense —to Florence and Hungary brought the Professor’s message of condolence, a vague telegraphic reply from Anthony, and, two days later, a letter. She sat, one soft September morning, on a bench in Battersea Park reading the letter over and over again. The leaves were yellowing, and already some had splashed drearily on the gravelled path. The orna- mental water in front of her was colourless—as colour- less as her life without Anthony. For the first time she doubted him, his love and his constancy. “Perella mia,” he wrote, “you flit like a pale little ghost from Florence to haunts in England unknown to me. I’ve been waiting for days to learn where a mes- sage of sympathy would reach you. The Pension Toselli would have been a vain address, for we know the fly-blown letters in that dreadful rack in the corridor. My dearest, I grieve with you. I know how you, in your romantic great little soul, loved your father. I wish I could come and sit by you, your dear hand in mine, and comfort you in your sorrow. But a web of affairs from which I can’t escape holds me here far longer than I had anticipated. I'll be in London in a month’s time. I wonder if you could wait for Wie ia And so forth, and so on, and ainsi de suite, etcetera, etcetera. First America, then Dinard, then Hungary, and now this indefinite date in England... . Her heart was so cold that it hurt physically, and she put her hand toit. She stared hopelessly across the water, conscious of little else but a shrinking of body and soul into an imponderable speck of agony. Should she cling to the forlorn hope and wait for him? 154 PERELLA A man sat down at the other end of the bench. He was gaunt, unshaven, and clad in lamentable garments. She glanced at him out of the tail of her eye. He bore a curious resemblance to a dilapidated and disreputable Fanshawe. He pulled out of his pocket a copy of the Daily Herald and began to read it, with a deep pucker- ing of the brows. | Presently a nursemaid and a chubby child came up and paused on the water’s brink to feed a couple of Muscovy ducks that swam near the edge. The nurse’s casts of bread reached the ducks whose gobblings gave the child great amusement. But the child’s cast of a considerable hunk fell on the strip of grass screened from the path by low wire netting. The careless nurse led the child away. Perella folded up her letter and stuffed it in her bag. Should she wait for him? Tears started afresh from eyes that already had wept, and impatiently she wiped them away with a rag of a handkerchief. She swallowed lumps and rose and walked away. After about fifty yards she discovered that she had left the handkerchief on the bench. It was a good handker- chief with a bit of lace on it—worth retrieval. She began to retrace her steps, when she saw the man that had been her neighbour rise and pick up the piece of bread miscast by the child and put it in his pocket. She turned and fled. The handkerchief did not mat- ter. The act in itself was poignant with horror. If the man spied discovery he would die of shame. . . . Instinctive womanhood suggested a ghastly moral. She saw herself waiting, waiting for the crust of love thrown carelessly by Anthony, and pouncing upon it like a thing starved. Her pride rose in a torture of revolt. No. She would not wait. She would return to Florence. If he loved her, he would seek her there. CHAPTER X In late October, Perella drifted to Venice. Her Argentine patron, having found that his Renaissance Palace would be incomplete without a Giovanni Bellini, had (not without taste and judgment) selected one of the smaller Madonnas in the Accadémia di Belle Arti. His agent, the Florentine dealer, had offered her the commission, and Silvester Gayton, whom she consulted, had counselled acceptance. Madame Toselli, to whose care she would return after her business in Venice, se- cured for her a room in a friendly and_ inter- recommending Pension on the Zattere; which was very convenient, since, as all the world knows, the Accadémia is on the Santa Maria della Salute side of the Grand Canal, and less than a quarter of a mile from the Zat- tere, and the Pension Polonia. She loved her work. She adored the blue-hooded Madonna of the soft, loving mouth and downcast eyes, and hands clasping the body of the Child with the dark golden curls, and the fascinating folds of baby flesh around His throat. She saw in the picture motherhood in its most perfect and exquisite flower. Never henceforth, she felt, could she thus surrender her soul to a Raphael for all its unreachable impeccahil- ity. She drenched herself in the Bellini, the nepenthe of consolation. Not that Venice, unique of cities, failed to make its appeal. The artist in her reacted instinctively to its waterways and sunsets and the black, high-prowed gon- dolas of which she had dreamed since her fanciful child- hood amid the chimney-pots. She could stand on the 155 156 PERELLA Ponte di Belle Arti before twilight and let the aching sense of beauty grip her heart until she could almost gasp with the pain of it. But the pain was too poig- nant, seeing that she was alone. There was no arm to clutch in compensation for caught breath; no ear into which to murmur inarticulate wonder ; no eyes in which, looking up, she could see the thrilling reflection of her emotions; there was no response that would translate the ache into rapture. Often she shut her eyes and fled, hurt, wounded by the beauty that was incommuni- cable. She dreaded the hours when she was cut off from the companionship of her adored Madonna. Yet was she driven forth into Venice. 'The Pension Polonia was but the Pension Toselli transferred from the banks of the Arno to those of the Canal of the Zattere. She found the same Anglo-American types, the same spaghetti and stringy veal, the same pallid Giuseppe, the same uninspiring and familiar smell. There lodged in the pension even a young man from Cook’s, who was thrilled by the coincidence of her ac- quaintance with his Florentine colleague. : One Sunday afternoon he took her for a couple of hours in a gondola through the unknown marvels of the little canals—hitherto her water trips had been con- _ fined to those that could be thriftily made by steamer or motor-launch—and she saw many churches and palaces, and wandered into tiny piazzettas, with a masterpiece of a well-head in the middle, where for centuries the world had stood quite still. She enjoyed the sensuous restfulness of the gliding through the sluggish water, and the anticipation of what of beauty the next turn of a corner would reveal. But, towards the end of the jaunt, the foolish youth, who, up to then, had been an intelligent and amiable companion, began to make in- discreet love to her. And that spoiled a dreamy after- SILVESTER 157 noon of oblivion. He was an honest English young man. ‘There was nothing Don Juanesque about his sudden wooing. Perella, in her miniature way, was physically attractive, and she had a bright wit and— perhaps her father’s only educative gift—the sense of epigrammatic phrase. The young man—small blame to him, and yet, the pity of it!—lost his head. Per- ella found instant means of retrieving it, and stuck it back firmly on reluctant shoulders. Perhaps there is a deal of philosophy in the old tag: “°Tis not so much the lover who woos, As the lover’s way of wooing.” The way of the young man from Cook’s was a million miles from that of Anthony Blake. He played the devil’s own discord on every nerve suddenly strung tight, in Perella’s little body. A pale and angry girl, and a sulky, rueful young man landed at the steps on the Zattere, and parted on the landing of the Pension Polonia after the most perfunctory salutations. Thenceforward, she took her Venice in solitude. It was better so. Alone, she could transpose its beauty into a minor key, so that her young soul could sing its sad accompaniment. For, into terms of lament must she translate all things for her own consolation. Anthony had gone from her for ever. She read the truth behind his letters spaced out tactfully at longer and longer intervals. He deplored, not ungenerously, as one seizing an occasion of quarrel, her departure from London before he could arrive, but despairingly, with the air of one helpless before the buffetings of Fate. Destiny’s iron hand had guided his movements. In London he was on the point of taking aéroplane, the lightning’s back, any means of instantaneous travel, so 158 PERELLA as to pass a day or two with her in Florence, when his brother-in-law, the Major-General, Gloria’s husband, was carried off to an operating-table, and for a week lay between life and death, during which interval, Gloria, at madness-point, had detained him by her side. Perella apart, Gloria was the only being in the world he loved. Perella, with her magical sympathy would understand. His only free time was thus taken up. He could not once again cancel his passage to New York, and the American engagements made for him by the kindest of friends. He had gone to America. And the last time she had seen him was at the Florence railway station on that stifling morning in July. She knew that she would never see him again. The New York Herald, with its deadly chronicle of the movements of prominent Ameri- cans, and also the English illustrated weeklies, on fly- blown back numbers of which she would pathetically pounce, supplied her with much news omitted from Anthony’s letters. She saw him mentioned by name— twice snap-shotted—in a world into which she could never dream of entering, the world of which Doney’s in Florence, filled with women, all furs and pearls and violets, was still the symbol. ‘There was one snapshot showing him bending forward, tennis racket in hand, with his heart-rendingly familiar grace, in conversation with two ladies, the Duchesse de Montfaucon and Mrs. Ellison. He belonged to their sphere. The fact, pro- claimed by the vulgar reproduction, jumped to the eyes. . . . From the list of arrivals at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, she picked out the names of Mrs. Ellison and Mr. Anthony Blake. Anthony had made no mention of the lady in his letter from Paris. Again she read that, in London, Mrs. Ellison had given a luncheon party; and, among the guests—kings, queens, princes, SILVESTER 159 dukes, duchesses, Prime Ministers, ambassadors—the list dazzled her poor little eyes—she saw the name of Anthony. Finally, paragraphs, almost juxtaposed, to the effect that Mr. Anthony Blake, the distinguished young English artist, was sailing on Thursday by the Homeric, and that by the Homeric were returning to America, for the autumn, Mr. Cornelius Adams and Mrs. Ellison, the popular hostess of Florence and Di- nard. He had never mentioned the fact that he would be fellow-passenger with Mrs. Ellison. If she was jealous, it was not of the woman, for often in Florence Anthony had anticipated such a possibility by assuring her that the lady was old enough to be his mother: indeed, in his account of their first meeting in Doney’s, on his famously victorious pursuit of cock- tails, he had characterized her as quite old. The vil- lainous photograph, too, intensively inspected, showed her a woman attractive only by the magic of expensive clothes. And there was a daughter of twenty in Min- nesota, for whom, as Anthony had frankly said, he had made the second portrait of Mrs. Ellison. In spite of Perella’s queer knowledge of the world and its ways —for, in her Bohemian waif’s upbringing and subse- quent career, what veils, protective from life, had been cast over maiden eyes?—she never suspected the possi- bility of sentimental relations between Anthony and his patroness. ‘To her, Beatrice Ellison was but a symbol of the ineluctable forces that had carried off Anthony —from the plane to which he had descended to meet her—back to the plane on which he had been born and was ordained to have his being. As far as she could hate, she hated the woman. It was all her doing. She pictured her as a remorseless fairy godmother who had plucked a reluctant prince from the goatherd’s hut, regardless of his possible 160 PERELLA feelings for the goatherd’s daughter, in order to set him on the throne where he should be. Thus, perhaps, in her hours of humiliation and for- giveness, did Perella envisage the fading of her happi- ness. But there were hours also when her heart was near to breaking, and she sobbed in helpless misery, remembering the tones of voice that had stirred her fibres, kisses and clutches of body that she had held sacred, and the first smell of the rough tweed overcoat under her nose. And then, again, her pride would re- volt, and she would spring up, and dip her towel in the inadequate ewer, and fiercely sluice away the traces of tears, and steel herself to the confrontation of life. That she inherited, indeed, from her father—the lust of life. No matter how small a speck she was on the world’s surface, she was conscious—now, curiously enough, after all this intolerable pain, more vehemently than ever—of her own intense and vibrating personal- ity. Nothing lay further from her philosophy than the attitude of the poor soul that sat sighing by a syca- more tree and sang rubbish all about a green willow. The said poor soul obviously hadn’t to earn her own liv- ing; still less at such a fascinating trade as hers. She had neither sense of personal dignity nor of duty to- wards the world at large. In a vague, semi-religious way, Perella was conscious of that sense of duty. If she, no matter how insignificant, was not set in the world for some purpose, what was the good of living at all? So pride and stalwartness of faith saved her from break- down. She threw her heart into her picture and sought to project her soul into that of Bellini while he thought he was painting the Mother of God. One day, when she had nearly finished her task and SILVESTER 161 was standing away from her easel with bent brows, her earnest gaze travelling backwards and forwards from original to copy, and from copy to original, a familiar voice sounded in her ear: “Splendid, my dear; splendid.” She turned swiftly, and saw the kind eyes of Silvester Gayton smiling at her through the thick lenses of his pince-nez. He had bowler hat in hand, and one grey suede glove on and the right-hand one off. The fact of this elderly but angelic friend dropping down suddenly from heaven into her environment nearly brought tears of gladness to her eyes. “You, Professor! How extraordinary!” “Not so very.” He stuck his hat on the back of his head. “I received an urgent summons from Venice from Professor Brabiani. You know—the famous Brabiani—friend of Ruskin and the Brownings. Wrote to say he’s dying, poor old man. So I packed up at once and arrived last evening.” “But how extraordinary you should find me here, at once.” “Not at all,” said he. “I knew the exact spot where you would be likely to be, and came to look for you.” She put her hand on her bosom. “You came to look for me?” Her little air of puzzlement, and her ingenuous accentuation of the last word made him laugh. “Why not, my dear? Don’t you think you’re worth looking for?” She gave an instinctive tidying touch to her hair, and said with a sigh: “You’re always too kind to me.” She moved aside, with a tiny gesture of invitation. “Do you really think it’s anything like?” be, eae 7X am x Sony 162 PERELLA “T don’t call a thing splendid when it isn’t. I’ve got a reputation to keep up.” “Yes,” she argued.. “But my father used to say that adjectives can be used positively, comparatively, and superlatively. That was when people used to ac- cuse him of slinging his tremendous words about. . . .” She stopped, rather scared at her temerity. “Well? . .. goon.” He regarded her amusedly. “Well, you might have used the word comparatively. » Splendid for a beginner. Splendid as an effort. You see what I mean?” “A professional critic has to use words positively. If he doesn’t he gets into a devil of a mess. Perhaps in deference to your modesty I’ll modify the word.” He put his gloved left hand on her left shoulder, and looked over the right. “It’s jolly good. Really, jolly good. 'There!” “I’m so glad. But,” she sighed, “that wonder- ful tone. I should never get it if I lived a hundred years.” “Do you think John Bellini got it, or any of these old humbugs? It’s their partner, Time, that has done the trick for them—and not a hundred years but four hundred. If you want to see what Claude Lorrain really painted, go and see the two or three cleaned pictures of his in the National Gallery. You try and give the effect of Time to it, and you’re not a sincere copyist, but a faker like the abominable people that bore worm-holes in pseudo-antique furniture... . When our friend, Giovanni, painted the picture, it looked just like that—and he was delighted with it.” She murmured something about his being very com- forting. “Thank God,” said he, “for a sound reason for giv- ing anybody comfort. Now,” he added, “if I may SILVESTER 163 venture . .. I know the thing isn’t finished—that’s why ...if I may presume... .” He glowed enthusiastically, and, with curved thumb, subjected her work to his marvellously constructive criticism. She had the impression of being divinely taught. Infinitesimal details of modelling and shadow and tone that had escaped her eye were revealed to her through his uncanny vision. She remembered his first inspection of her work at the Uffizi in the spring —his diffident yet valuable suggestions. It was the same little elderly, boyish man, clad almost in the same clothes. Yet then he had been precise, apologetic. Now, just as he had done on the occasion of her visit with the Marchesa della Torre to the Roman theatre at Fiesole, he became once more the inspired teacher, sensitive artist speaking to artist through the livmg soul of a great genius. “Look at that—see?” said he, at last; thumb went back from Bellini to Perella. “I can tell you how it ought to be done, and you can do it, and you will do it to-morrow. But I could no more do it myself than kill a bull in a bull-ring. You understand, don’t you?” “Of course. Ill try to do it this afternoon.” “No. Better wait till to-morrow. It’ll take twenty- four hours to convince your artistic conscience that I’m right. Intellectually, you recognize it. But there’s something in us—God knows where”—he thumped head and heart—“‘which is far beyond intel- lect. If you rush at it, you may spoil the whole thing. Size it up subconsciously, and to-morrow you'll do it delicately. In the meanwhile, put the whole matter out of your mind.” Said Perella: “But I must work this afternoon. The days are shortening.” Mechanically he pulled on his other glove, and the 164 PERELLA teacher vanished behind the courteous and shy gentle- man. “T was wondering whether you would do me the honour of lunching with me and cheering my loneliness for this afternoon. I’m, in fact, at a very loose end. Professor Brabiani is too ill to-day to receive visitors, so if you can put up, my dear Perella, with a boring old fellow, you’ll be doing an act of human charity.” *“But—Professor ” She caught a rapturous breath. “It would be simply lovely!” They lunched comfortably at a corner table in the Hotel de Europe where Gayton was staying. He sketched out the object of his journey. Professor Brabiani had devoted most of a lifetime to a monumen- tal work on the Ducal Palace. It was a mass of typescript practically finished. Illness postponing and finally precluding the author’s revision, he had prayed his caro confratello to undertake the editing, to which Gayton had willingly agreed. To be associated with the illustrious Brabiani was an honour that any scholar would have accepted with humility. Now, all of a sudden, the illustrious one’s illness had taken an ugly turn. His family was in despair. He, too, but rather over the unfinished history than over either himself or his family. ‘The necessary personal talk between Gay- ton and himself, till lately a matter to be arranged for an indefinite date of common convenience, became one of urgent importance. So Silvester Gayton had obeyed the summons of a despairing, obedient, and none too understanding family, who for years had loathed the sight and sound and all that therein was of the dull, useless and accurséd book—it’s always well to consider things from other folks’ point of view—and, on arrival, had found the doors of the illustrious Brabiani closed against him. SILVESTER 165 “TI know people in Venice, of course, in my own line of business,” said he. ‘‘But they’re a stuffy lot. The erudite Latins expect you to be intellectual every time and all the time, without a moment’s interval for re- freshment. 'They’re the most unhumorous dogs in the world. I like to be human and crack a joke now and then . .. so, you see, I thought you might be in- dulgent enough to let me come and crack a joke with you.” They spent a mellow afternoon together, drifted in a gondola, in and out and round about the Grand Canal, and only saw one picture—the Giorgione in the Vendra- mini Palace. In the intimate comfort of the cushioned seat, he became the simple and charming companion of whom Perella had had glimpses here and there in Florence. He told her the funny little stories which every man with a quick eye on human foibles has har- vested during the years. He set her talking about her- self, her queer but innocent Bohemian past, her present fight for existence. Her small paternal heritage, con- scientiously invested by Grey Fanshawe, added to her aunt’s legacy, would give her over a hundred a year to live upon. With her earnings, she would be quite rich. His sympathy warmed her, and by the time they journeyed down the Grand Canal, she saw every- thing in the colours of the sunset—gold, green, blood- red—behind the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. They landed by the Piazzetta and, passing San Marco, crossed the Piazza to Florian’s, most historic of cafés, where they had tea. She forgot that he was the great Commendatore Silvester Gayton, carry- ing in his head knowledge enough to sink a super- Dreadnought, and chattered away to him as to a friendly girl. Only once did a chance word from him rob the pleas- 166 PERELLA ant world of its colour, and transform it for a short while into a drab wilderness. “And our young friend, Blake—what’s become of him? Gone to America to make his fortune?” She braced herself to casual reply. ‘Yes, I think so. In fact, he sent me a line just before he sailed. . . .” “He is a clever boy. Perhaps a bit too clever. Too facile. But he’ll bring it off, I’m sure. . .. A nice boy, too, with most agreeable manners.” “Oh, charming manners,” said Perella. She caught the sound of an unusual rasp in her voice. But it was a question either of a rasp or a sob, and she was not going to betray herself to anybody on earth, not even to the gentle friend who had uncon- sciously set her back again amid grey sorrows. She was unaware that, in making her pronouncement, she had looked away from him, and that his shrewd eyes behind the glasses had seen the little twitch of her lips that framed the words. “I believe, my dear,” said he, “that every man even- tually gets what he deserves.” She braced herself again, and regarded him bravely. ‘And what do you think Anthony Blake deserves?” “Tt’s early yet, to say. He has got to prove him- selfs? He touched her hand, drew her attention to a couple at the next table—a mean little man with a scrubby thin black moustache and a grenadier of a woman. They were disputing the bill. Four cakes, said she, had they eaten, and not five. The man at last con- fessed to surreptitious greed. The wife turned on him the most furious of shoulders. He paid the bill which happened to be an even lire. The waiter lingered. SILVESTER 167 The man put down two pennies and slunk out behind his stalking mate. Silvester Gayton beamed. “Don’t you think I’m right? Hasn’t that fellow got what he deserves?” “But the poor waiter hasn’t,” cried Perella, diverted by the unseemly comedy. “How can people be so mean? And the worst of it is that they were English.” Silvester beckoned the waiter. “My friend,” said he in Italian, “if those were English, for the credit of my country I will raise the twenty centisimi they have given you to the sum to which you are honourably entitled. I see they have had chocolate, ices, and cakes.” The Commendatore, said the waiter, was very kind, but he could not abuse his generosity. Those were not English or Americans. *“What were they then?” asked Perella. “Tedeschi,” said the waiter with a mountainous shrug. And, with a wave of his hand, he went about his further business. “But they seemed to talk ordinary English,” said Perella. “You didn’t hear the lady, when she got angry, say, ‘more as’—mehr als in German—instead of ‘more than’? It’s a shibboleth. No matter how perfectly a German speaks English, yet, once he gets off his guard and excited, the ‘more as’ is inevitably bound to come out sooner or later.” He took the ball on the bound, according to the old French metaphor, and entertained her with stories of Teutonic psychology until she forgot their logical sequence from his mention of the name of the young man, Anthony Blake. After tea he accompanied her to the Zattere by 168 PERELLA gondola, and took leave of her within a few yards of the Pension Polonia. She did not see him again in Venice, until the end of the following week. ‘The illustrious Brabiani having rallied, and being possessed with the fury of despair, had kept him busy night and day over the monumental work on the Ducal Palace, until, perhaps to the relief of everybody, a merciful Providence threw him into a syncope from which he died. Silvester stayed to attend the gloomy ceremonial of the funeral to which flocked half scholastic and official Italy, somewhat against his will, for the family, having loathed the monumental work for years, and accusing it of slow murder, glowered upon Silvester as an aider and abet- tor, an accessory, as it were, before the fact. During the interim between the death and the funeral, his time had been taken up by the Venetian intellectuals whose lack of humour he had deplored, and by research, neces- sary for the editing of the book, m the Archivio Centrale di Stato. There were also certain legal difficulties connected with the immortal work, the only typescript copy of which he had carried off to his room in the Hotel de l’7Europe. When the black-vested gathering melted away from the graveside in the Campo Santo, after the dismal orations, Florence summoned him on urgent affairs. Perella, rung up on the telephone at the Pension Polonia, felt a little thrill of wonder and pride at hearing him apologize, as though he had been a boy, for his criminal neglect. He, who had set his heart on showing her Venice, had lamentably failed. Would she forgive him? Would she forgive him to the extent of deigning to have tea with him at Florian’s before his imperative return to Florence? “Dear Professor—what?—I said ‘Dear Professor’— SILVESTER 169 very dear Professor—of course I’ll come,” said Perella. “, . . Why, it’s only too delightful of you to think of me.” | So at the appointed hour they met. Silvester stood awaiting her on the terrace, and greeted her bare- headed with bowler hat and right-hand glove in gloved left hand, and umbrella crooked over left arm. Lonely and abandoned atom in a big world, she had lived since their last meeting in the glow of his friend- ship. She had warmed her hands, her heart even, before its glow. She derived from it an almost inex- plicable sense of comfort. She knew that, for some obscure reason, she had now the affection of the gentle, little great man. He was a shield and a buckler and a tower and all sorts of engines of defence behind which, at any given moment, she could fly for certain security. And his service was not given, like that of Fanshawe, irreproachable in consideration and mansuetude, for her father’s sake. It was for her own. She caught herself speculating on his loss in not having a daugh- ter who could devote herself to his happiness. She herself would have devoted herself to the happiness of her worshipped hero of a father, had that flame-like anomaly of manhood ever expressed the desire to be so cockered. But he had affectionately thrown her out, for no other reason, of course, than her own inefficiency. Before Caroline she paled as a rushlight before the sun. But without depreciation of her father, Professor Gayton was cast in a different mould. Save for a com- mon ground of intelligence and love of laughter, never were two men further apart. Silvester Gayton needed a woman about him. That did intuitive sex divine; yet it translated the need not into terms of C-~-lines, but into those of sweeter and more exquisi-c ..!2- tions. . 170 PERELLA During this week’s interval she received a letter from the Marchesa della Torre, with whom she main- tained a pleasant acquaintance. “My dear,” wrote the elderly lady, “if you see our dear Professor in Venice, make him take you about a bit. You needn’t be afraid, for he’s fond of you; and it will do him good. I’m an old, old friend of his, and I know his life inside out, so I’m not talking foolishly. He has been very unhappy most of his life —and of course he’ll never marry. But he’s the dear- est of creatures, and I know how he appreciates any silly little attention that an old woman like me, or a young, clever girl like you, can pay him. He’s fed to the teeth with his great reputation and the bores of the earth who worry his life out, and he’d rather spend a couple of hours talking about any old thmg with a woman—me antiquated, or you young—provided the woman has the rudiment of a brain, and the beat of the heart—than with all the high-brows of Europe. So don’t have any compunction, my dear. Treat him as if you were his daughter, claiming his companionship and his guidance, and he’ll respond like a starving man presented with a good dish of spaghetti. . . .” The letter crystallized vague fancies of Perella, hith- erto held, as it were, in solution. So when they sat over their tea and ices in the Café Florian, she viewed him in a new and clearer light. The awful veil of his reputation fell away from him, and the natural gentle- ness of the man was enhanced by the pathetic. She noticed, with a queerly stirred vision, that the edge of his collar was frayed. This was not a sign of poy- erty. Nor, as in the case of her father’s old slovenliness of attire, one of loose and careless living. It was evidence of a woman’s neglect. Caroline would not have admitted such a collar into her father’s drawer, SILVESTER 171 so he could not possibly have put it on. But there was nobody except the elderly Italian housekeeper, ignorant and uncritical of niceties, to throw offending articles of attire into, say, the dust-bin of charity. She saw him thrust a mechanical finger between collar-corner and throat. The thing was like a fret-saw. One of the buttons, too, of a glove, was hanging by a thread. The imp of the beautifully idiotic sped her, with a vague word of excuse, from the table to a desk of accounting women. Her breathless earnestness, her pretty, calculated Italian so prevailed, that a busy clerk dived into some secret feminine recess of her own and gave her what she demanded. She returned triumphant to the table, threaded needle in hand and thimble on finger. “My dear,” said the astonished Silvester, “‘what on earth are you doing?” Perella laughed. “I give you fifty guesses.” “You’re sewing a button on my glove.” “Fancy your guessing right first time!” He watched her slim fingers. When she handed the glove to him he thanked her in his prim courteousness. “I’m sure,” said he, “this is the only button that has ever been sewed on for me except by those who are professionally supposed to sew on buttons. And you know, my dear Perella, the professional button-sewer, like the plumber, is artistic, temperamental, forgetful.” He tested the sewing. “You’re the most accom- plished and kindest of button-sewers. Really it was very sweet of you to think of it.” That was the end of the matter; for all the needles and threads and thimbles in the world would not have mended the serrated collar, and she could not go out and buy him a new one. Besides, she had much to tell him. The Bellini was 172 PERELLA finished—ready to be packed and dispatched to Buenos Aires. She had done her best to profit by his vision, and had been hoping he could see the picture. He de- plored his ability. Florence, a meeting of a certain dreadful set of eruditi of which he was president, claimed his immediate presence. But the Bellini done, what kept her in Venice? She broke on him her triumphant news. Another commission! A copy of the Vittore Carpaccio in the Accadémia—the Presenta- tion in the Temple, with the delicious people playing lutes and flutes at the foot. “Then we shan’t see you in Florence till goodness knows when,” said Silvester. “Tt’s a great big picture,” said Perella. ‘All one side taken up by three stuffy old gentlemen in difficult vestments.” “I know,” said he, “but there’s a great big lot of love to be got into it, and that takes time—a devil of a time.” He poised a hesitating spoon over the liquid remainder of his ice, and laid it down again. ‘‘Don’t,” he went on, “accept another commission in Venice with- out letting me know. Of course, big things are big things. But—I can fix up Florentine orders for you, I know, so don’t catch hold of anything here. Besides, I don’t like to feel you’re all alone in Venice. I should like you to be in Florence where I, if you'll allow me to say so, my dear, can keep an eye on you.” She divined something more than solicitude for her welfare. He had struck a faint minor chord of self which vibrated through her very gratefully. She said in a tone in which raillery was redeemed by a soft tendervess: “Do you think I chall run away with a gon: dlier?” “You might run away with anything.” He tapped SILVESTER 173 her hand across the table. “Often an old bachelor knows more about women than the most multitudinously married of married men. At any moment—all alone here—you might do something, if not desperate, at least fantastic. You might get religion, and go into a convent, or get pneumonia and go into the Campo Santo; in either case, I shouldn’t be there to give you a helping hand out of the muddle.” Perella, looking down, made three separate little movements. With her forefinger she pushed away from her, first her tea-cup, then her ice-glass, then her glass of water. “IT can’t understand,” she said, at last, “why you bother your head about me.” “Can’t you?” He leaned across the table. “And yet you’re a little person of very quick intelligence.” She started, flushed. What did he mean? She raised her dark eyes to meet his smile, very kindly and somewhat sad. “That’s why,” she answered. ‘My intelligence tells me that I’m of no particular account to anybody .. . so why should you worry about me?” “Just because I’m a selfish old fellow, my dear, and _ Pve given you my affection. That sounds horribly patronizing, but I don’t mean it that way. Who could help it? Personally and selfishly, I should prefer to feel that you were near by me in Florence rather than far away, out of callin Venice. So that if there was a glove button .. .” Here was the unhappy great man of the Marchesa’s letter revealing himself, as it were, from behind her words, and pleading for himself. In the confusion of thought and emotion, tears dimmed her eyes. “T’ll cancel the Carpaccio and go back to Florence,” she declared. 174 PERELLA He shot out both hands in protestation. “My dear child, you’ll do no such lunatic thing.” He fussed and called the waiter, and paid the modest bill and led her out into the mysteriously lit Piazza. “If you did such a wicked and sinful thing for me, I'd take train to Naples and climb up Mount Vesuvius and throw myself into the crater. All I ask you is to come back to Florence as soon as you’ve done the Car- paccio.” So, as they crossed the Piazza and the Piazzetta to the steps where the gondolas were moored, the little pact was made. It was made in a drizzling rain, under Silvester’s umbrella. It was a miserable evening for those who could not see the astonishing effects of con- flicting lights across the wet and gleaming flagstones. . San Marco was but a black mass against blacker darkness. ‘The Campanile caught here and there a fugitive and perplexing illumination. The shops in the arcades shone dazzling, but beyond the fringe of glistening brown edges to the sides of the square, they accentuated the central mystery of gloom. ‘The elec- tric lights on the Piazzetta cast no shadows. The day had been fine and the gondolier had not thought of a tenda, the historic coach body stuck over the seats. In the soft and penetrating rain they en- tered a gondola and, side by side under the Professor’s umbrella, they made their slow way round the point of the Salute into the Canal of the Giudecca. She felt a criminal, a poisoner, a murderer, in allow- ing him to endure such discomfort. Protestations had ' been vain. He had summoned her, said he, for his own egotistic pleasure, from the Zattere, and to Zattere would he safely conduct her. The rain was gentle, the umbrella fairly adequate, the journey not unromantic. SILVESTER 175 Quivering spears of light shot across the still, yet fretted, waters. “Tt’s very beautiful, all the same,” said Perella. “TY think I'll reckon it the most charming quarter of an hour in my life,” said Silvester. At the steps of the Zattere he landed briskly. He stood, one hand holding the umbrella, the other out- stretched to help her. Owing both to the confused light of the long line of buildings, and the slipperiness of the wet steps, she missed his hand, caught at nothing, and fell, her right arm under her. Picked up, at first she laughed at her clumsiness, then became conscious of a darting agony so acute that she nearly fainted. The woman of the Pension Polonia carried her to her room, and Silvester sat in the salon until a doctor came and made his report. It was somewhat alarming. CHAPTER XI As a matter of fact, as far as Silvester’s unscientific mind could gather from the Italian doctor’s explana- tion, Perella was in a devil of a mess altogether. Her arm, doubled up under her, had been broken into all kinds of compound fractures, chiefly of the wrist and upper arm, and, as her side had caught the edge of the last stone stair, there was fear of some internal injury. Silvester, whom a retired celibate life had rendered un- familiar with such crises of existence, wrung his hands in his despair, like the Rover gentleman in the idiotic old poem. What was to be done? He did not care for the look of the doctor, a seedy, garlic-emanating person of middle-age, who, being resident on the Zat- tere, had been summoned as the nearest to hand. He had the worried air of the unsuccessful man. He had set the bones as best he could. Spoke of plaster of Paris for weeks. A trained nurse, of course... . The lady of the Pension Polonia also wrung her hands. The Pension was full to bursting point. Only as a fa- vour to Madame Toselli had she reserved a room, dis- appointing another client, for the young lady. As to a nurse ... there was no corner in which she could sleep; and no service available for the special needs of an invalid. There was, of course, the British Hospital on the Giudecca, across the Canal. .. . . By the telephone they learned that not a bed in the hospital was available. Didn’t they know that there was an influenza epidemic? Also a ship from Egypt had landed them with more typhoid patients than they knew what to do with. The hospital bitterly resented 176 SILVESTER A177 the doctor’s suggestion. He began to wring his hands, too. ‘There was only the General Hospital. “Never in this world,” cried Silvester. ‘“Can’t you suggest something else?’ He spoke Italian with Italian gesture and a certain amount of Italian fire. The signorina was the daugh- ter of his old friend, to him preciocissima. It was through his fault that she had fallen. Had he grasped her hand, this would not have happened. The best that the science and luxury of Europe could offer was at her disposition. 'The seedy doctor made the humble suggestion that he would welcome a consultation with the eminent Dr. Farini, one of the greatest surgeons in Italy. “Tf that is so,” said Silvester, “‘send for him at once.” The doctor went to the telephone. Silvester and the lady of the Pension mounted to the little room with windows overlooking a noisy, re-echoing calle, where lay Perella, a sorry white-faced thing, done up in splints and bandages. She smiled wanly, and de- clared herself perfectly comfortable. “T’ll never forgive myself,” said Silvester. “But it was my stupidity, dear Professor. There was your hand. I thought I was grabbing it, but the light must have been tricky. It’s I that can’t forgive myself for causing everybody all this trouble.” “You’re the most marvellous little angel I’ve ever met,” said Silvester. The next hour or two were nightmare. Perella fainted. ‘The lady of the Pension bundled him out unceremoniously to fetch the doctor. He sat in the salon, solitary among the alien inmates who trickled in to await their dinner. Then came the hour of dinner to which he was invited. But he had no use for food. He sat alone and looked at the pictures of stray sum- 178 PERELLA mer numbers of the Sketch and Tatler and Je Sais Tout. The great Farini arrived, and greeted him with the flattering remark that the call of the illustrious Com- mendatore Gayton was a command. He went up to Perella. Stayed for the major portion of eternity. Came down, eventually, with a grave face, and, as the diners had flooded the salon, drew Silvester into the private bureau of the Pension. ‘The original diagnosis had been correct. The first treatment had naturally been in the nature of first aid. He, forewarned, had brought the necessary appliances. There were internal lesions. No danger to life, of course, but the case was grave. Like Sir Ralph, in the same old poem, Silvester tore | his hair—or the greying fringe of it that was left. ‘For the love of God, doctor, what can we do? She can’t stay here. ‘There’s no room in the British Hos- pital, and I can’t leave that little girl whom I love like my own daughter alone in the Ospedale Civile. My God! If it had only happened in Florence.” “What then?” “What then? Why, I have an apartment five times too big for me, where she could have beautiful air and a hundred nurses and delicate food and everything she needs.” Dr. Farini smiled professionally. ‘There’s no rea- son why she shouldn’t be moved. Im a civilized coun- try like Italy there are ambulance carriages. Already T have telephoned for an English nurse from Florence. In Venice there are none available. She can take her back. Perhaps, too, Dr. Bardi would accompany her. But, my dear Commendatore, all that is expensive.” “*Will it be under a million lire?” asked Silvester. “You jest, Commendatore!” SILVESTER 179 “Then it shall be done,” cried Silvester, and he wrung the doctor’s two hands with extraordinary fervour. When he became aware that his presence in the Pen- sion Polonia was a matter rather of hindrance than of usefulness, he made his way to the Hotel de l’Europe. There he found his modest luggage in the hall, and, for the first time, remembered that he was due in Flor- ence on the morrow. He bade the porter take it back to his room. If the Society of Archivisti of Florence could not get on without his presidency, they could kill each other, and throw themselves into the Arno, or dis- solve in any old way they pleased. He was going to see Perella safe into the apartment in the Viale Milton. He mounted to his room, drew his gloves from his pocket, and threw them on the table. Memory smote him. He took up one, and the picture arose in his mind of her little dark head bending over it amid the crowd and clatter of the Café Florian, and her deft fingers plying needle and thread. So it came to pass that, after dreadful disorganiza- tion of easeful official life, Perella found herself in- stalled in the Viale Milton, with a view from her bed over the hills and Monte Morello, with walls discreetly graced by the warmest and most comforting of Sil- vester’s Primitives, and with a pleasant woman in blue uniform by her side. In spite of pain and the heavy discomfort of imprisoned arm, she felt curiously con- tented. Never in her life had she awakened in a room so gracious, or to ministrations so tender and noiseless. She reflected that this was the first time she had ever been so ill as to stay in bed, having been a young crea- ture of surprising toughness. It was an odd experi- ence. The mellow autumn days passed almost uncounted, 180 PERELLA filled by sick-room routine, delicate meals, orgies of books, magazines and periodicals, and the visits of friends. For, when she recovered sufficiently from the injury to her side, she had many visitors. ‘The Pension Toselli supplied Madame herself and the Grewsons and the Brabazon ladies. The last brought her a knitted magenta silk bed-jacket, and a copy of the late Pro- fessor Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spirit- ual World, which they still regarded as the final pro- nouncement on the reconciliation of science with re- ligion. And Perella reintroduced them to Professor Gayton, who was very shy and charming, and so sent them away exceedingly happy. ‘There was also the Marchesa della Torre, who came nearly every day, and, after the way of discreet and capable old English women, deputized for Silvester, incapable head of house- hold, and shared with the nurse the doctor’s confidences and instructions. 'There was the Signorina Demonetti, who brought humble little offerings of chocolate; and a stray girl or two came, fellow-copyists whose acquaint- ance she had made in the galleries. And, of course, there was Silvester fussing in at odd moments, after many precautionary taps, to get the last minute’s news of her progress, and to bring flowers or an armful of the newest and lightest literature. Once he suggested summoning Caroline Annaway. It must be so dreadful for her to be all alone, in a strange old bachelor’s house. “Dreadful,” she said. “And you’re a_ perfect stranger—perfettissimo,” she smiled. But she would not let him send for Caroline, having a delicate sense of environment. Caroline, contented as far as it was possible for widow of John Annaway to be, prospered in her Chelsea tea-shop. She wrote glow- SILVESTER 181 ing accounts of crowded tables and of new curtains she was putting up in her flat. Perella took counsel of the Marchesa. “Of course,” said she, “if the dear Professor thinks it’s a compromising situation, and would like . . .” “Good God! my child,” cried the Marchesa, “I’m here. What more could the prim little man want?” “He isn’t prim,” Perella declared. ‘“He’s a dar- ling.” “Then what’s all the fuss about?” Thus came the decision which she announced to Silvester. “It was for your sake entirely,” said he. “I thought 4 “I know,” Perella interrupted. “It must be awful for you not to be able to give me the things that would make me happy. I’m simply dying for a couple of kangaroos and a diamond tiara.” She stretched out her left hand, took his, and, before he knew what she was doing, kissed it. He bent over and touched her hair gently. *“You’re the very dearest child,” said he. And then he went and looked for quite a time at the Monte Morello. | At first she was much worried about the Carpaccio. She had set her heart on painting the three little musi- cians in the predella. But Silvester assuring her that Rosso, the dealer, had promised to keep the commission open until such time as she could execute it, she felt greatly comforted. The world was a charming place, populated chiefly by angels. One morning the nurse slit open for her an envelope bearing an American stamp, extracted the letter, and left her to read it. Returning half an hour later, she 182 PERELLA found Perella with eyes that looked as if they had been cried out. | It was an airy letter from Anthony, telling her of skyscrapers and boot-legging and the Players’ Club and a private exhibition of his work that Cornelius Adams was arranging for him. But competition was ferocious. Every square- or lantern-jawed young man he came across seemed to be a black and white artist. He would have to do something new or die. He was thinking of blood—real blood—as a medium. Human blood would create the greatest sensation, but it was ex- pensive in many ways. Rabbit was banal. If any- body would ship him a cheap consignment of quaggas, a colossal fortune was at his command. And then, hey! for Peacocks in England. But, failing this, the future was darkened by. the conglomerate sticks of charcoal upheld by the myriad horde around him of hungry artists exactly in his own position. “So Heaven knows, Perella mia, when our dream can come true. Heaven knows whether it ever can. But it was a beautiful dream and at any rate we’ve had it. If I don’t come up to what your romantic little soul has pictured me, I can only ask for your forgiveness. D’m just a middling artist, without a dog’s chance of doing sincere work. So, my dear, forget all about me. I’m not worth your thoughts. Perhaps one day I may come to you with a miraculous muster of peacocks, and, if your heart is free, and if I and they make humble obeisance before you . . . well, you see, my dear . . .” “My dear” saw. She saw with an agony of soul that surpassed the agony of shattered arm and bruised or- gans. It was the end. Really the end. And the an- guish of it was that the letter was all Anthony. She could picture him talking of darkening spears of char- coal and musters of peacocks. She hoped to God she SILVESTER 183 would never see a peacock again. She would slay it on sight! Well, it served her right, the goatherd’s daughter, for giving her heart to the prince in disguise. . . . At any rate, that was the end of it... . Later in the day she asked the nurse to write a letter at her dictation. “I am desired by Miss Perella Annaway, who has unfortunately sprained her arm and is unable to write, to acknowledge your letter, and to say that she quite understands, and that there’s nothing more to be said.” “And that’s that,” said the nurse to herself, wonder- ing what kind of miscreant could be the “Anthony Blake, Esquire,” who had.turned down so fragrant a flower of womanhood as her little patient. She would have given much to receive Perella’s con- fidences; but Perella’s pride kept her heart in oyster- shells, so that no one could get at it save by painful opening. She did her best, like a kindly and tactful woman, to relieve the following hours of depressed reac- tion. One clings to a dream as long as one can, even though one knows that one is in process of awakening to the dull reality of night or day. But when the awaken- ing finally comes, the dream has gone for ever, vanished into the awful Limbo where are stored, like shadow plays, the myriad despairs and beauties of human dreams. “I’m very anxious, nurse,” said Silvester, meeting her outside the room, after one of his visits to Perella. “She says there’s nothing wrong; but she seems to have lost vitality. That dreadful internal injury... don’t you think we ought to have another opinion?” The nurse smiled. “You needn’t worry about her health. She’s getting along splendidly.” 184 PERELLA “Then why ... ? She looks as white as a ghost, and one can see that, for all her sweetness, talking is an effort.” And the nurse told him about the letter which she had not seen, and the reply which she had written. Silvester nodded. ‘“We’ll go slow with her for the next week or so.” At a door in the hall where they had met he turned, and laid a finger on his lips. ‘Not aword. Make her think you think she has had a slight set-back. Much better.” “Blesséd babe,” muttered the nurse, when he disap- peared. He went into his own library on the other side of the building, whose southern windows commanded the com- pact majesty of Florence. It was a large room lined with books from floor to ceiling. Over the mantelpiece beneath which a wood fire was burning, hung an Adora- tion by a pictor ignotus of the school of Fra Barto- lomeo. There was Virgin and chubby Child, consider- ably advanced for His presumed age, and wooden oxen and a premature, golden-haloed saint or two in attend- ance, and the Three Kings, with their animals and offerings of jewels, and the usual background of hills. He had discovered it years before in a musty palazzo belonging to a decaying Italian family. Save for an agreeable colouring of blues and mellow reds, it was not very good. Not a critic in the world could have supported the family’s claim to its Fra Bartolomeo au- thorship. It had a hundred unforgivable crudities. But there was one little white impudent ass, curvetting under a dull and bearded Melchior, whose sleek, arched neck and indescribably satirical eye had caught his fancy. He had bought the picture when death’s final decay had rendered the family a fringe of nobodies, and SILVESTER 185 the contents of the palazzo had been sold by auction. He grew to love the ironical ass. None but a Great Master, a Great Thinker, a Great Philosopher, a Great Seer, unless he was a mere fortuitous bungler, could have proclaimed for all time so devastating a criticism of things human and humanly supposed divine. At first one thought it was just a trick of a bit of white paint; but then one saw that the eye was the resolving point of the carefully drawn, truculent attitude of the sneering animal. He caught the ass’s abominable eye as he entered the room. ‘The ass was laughing. The ass said: “I’ve looked upon many damned fools during the five centuries of my existence, but of all of them, friend Silvester, I think you’re the damnedest.” For the first time for twenty years, Silvester loathed the beast. Hitherto he had regarded him as a friend, one who saw eye to eye with him, through mundane vanities and superstitions, and aided him to resolve values and thus apply to human phenomena his serene analytical vision. And now this cynical party to one of the most soul-stirring scenes in the world’s history was jeering at him and calling him a damned fool. Now, the picture hung on the north wall facing the window, and sometimes the sun in summer fell hot upon it, so that, in view of blistering and crackling of canvas, he had rigged up a protective curtain. Yet on this November evening, the room only lit by shaded mellow electric lamps, he drew the curtain, with an angry gesture, over the abhorrent ass, and sat down at his great and generous old Venetian table to what, up to that moment, he had considered a labour of love—the reduction to lucidity of the late Professor Brabiant’s monumental work on the Ducal Palace. In his chair with the curved arms and the crossed, inlaid planks that 186 PERELLA made the supports, he leaned back uneager. He drew a cigarette from his modest silver case, and sought around for matches. He rose, with a little gesture of impatience, and turned to the mantelpiece where al- ways, In a cunning casket, lay an emergency reserve. He stood with his back to the fire, smoking reflectively and regarding across the rug-strewn floor, the manu- script and typescript laden table, with its two shaded lamps concentrating their beams on nothing less than abstract Work. “I suppose I must get on with the beastly thing,” said he. He made a pace or two about the room; looked up at the drawn curtain. Ashamed of previous childishness, he flung it back. “IT must get on with the infernal book,” he repeated. And then he caught the ass’s mocking eye. From the foul and bitter lips beneath the scornful nostrils came: “Who, of God’s insects, is ever going to read the dull stuff, anyway?” He drew the obscuring curtains once again very angrily. “Oh, Hell!” cried the mildest man in Europe, and the World’s Greatest Authority on Pre-Raphaelite Italian Art; and he rushed out of the intolerably enchanted library and sought refuge with a novel, before the fire in the restful atmosphere of the drawing-room, sancti- fied by his serene Primitives. There his thoughts could dwell, without the ironical comment of a devil in ass’s guise, on the unhappiness of the beloved waif under his protection. His heart being filled with pity and indignation, the novel had no meaning for him. It sprawled on the floor by his side. His acquaintance with the poignancy of life had been greater than that SILVESTER 187 with which a careless world credited him. Few had known, still fewer remembered; perhaps one creature left in the world still cared and sympathized—the Marchesa della Torre. It was only the oldest and wretchedest petty drama in the world. He had adored and married, ever so many years ago. And then a gayer gallant had ridden up and carried off the lady, and she had died soon afterwards. There had been no divorce, no anything to arouse even private attention. Thenceforward he called himself a bachelor—of late, an old bachelor. The wound had never healed, as the say- ing goes. . . . He could scarcely find it in his heart to reproach her, because the other man was six foot high and handsome as a god, and was in process of doing devil-may-care things in wildernesses, and sang like an angel. He, Silvester, had no chance against him. Nature, for good or evil, took its course. But it hurt like any of the tortures devised for damned souls by his friend Orcagna. . . . And the man had died a year ago, covered with medals and orders and decorations, and narrowly escaped a national funeral. So the sensitive little man who had kept his heart- break hidden from the world for nearly thirty years, sorrowed over the lamentable plight of Perella. Yet what could he do save call Anthony a damned young scoundrel, and wonder how a man of such apparent in- telligence, having in his hand a pear] richer than all his tribe, should throw it away like Othello’s base Indian. He made fierce resolve never to have anything to do with the unutterable young man. . . . The accurséd part of it was that, between Anthuny Blake and the Other Man in his own life, there were the most vital points of resemblance. . . . The poor little girl! Oh! It was a beastly shame—the poor little girl! He rose and went, in his instinctive connoisseur fashion, round 188 PERELLA the room, peering at his Primitives. A little Madonna, of the school of Giotto, looking straight out of the cracked canvas gave him most comfort. It is a question whether Silvester, if at that sensitive and emotional moment he had met the glance of the malevolent ass, would or would not have slashed him out of the picture, and cast him into the flames. As it was, he picked up his novel, and enjoyed it for the rest of the evening. Every balm that human affection could apply to bruised hearts was lavished on Perella. Unconscious of such treatment, her pride led the way to remedy. In a day or two she became once more the Perella of jest and laughter. “Y’m wasting such a lot of time,” she cried. ‘Rosso thinks he can place another copy of the Franciabigio, and there’s still the Carpaccio to be done. Do you think I'll be able to stand somewhere in Italy and paint with one hand in Florence and the other in Venice?” And then there came a day, a dark day, of storm cloud and whirling sleet, that obscured all vision of Tuscan Hills and pleasant things, when three wise men, two of them the greatest surgeons in Italy, and the third, the greatest authority on Italian painting, stood by the bedside. All three looked very grave, and one of them had eyes filled with unaccustomed tears. Perella’s arm, released from its plaster of Paris band- age, lay limp on the bed. The bones of the upper arm had set, and so had those of the wrist. But the wrist tendons had been torn irremediably. .. . With her right hand she would never be able to paint again. PART IV BEATRICE CHAPTER XII A BEWILDERED Anthony wandered about New York, when he had nothing else to do, in order to study the ways and sub-ways of the city. Finding that a com- fortable stock of francs reduced itself to a miserable sum of dollars, he quickly moved from the sedate hotel to which he had been recommended, to a humble hostelry in a street whose number conveyed no social meaning to his polite friends. Only a humorous outlook on life saved him from unbearable sense of grievance. Here he was, accustomed for many months to the fat of the land, con- demned again, figuratively (and sometimes literally when he dined alone) to the leanest of diet. Had not the proceeding been comic, he could have danced in impotent fury at having to put on unclean shoes in the morning, and go out and sit in a sort of circus and have them shined. He quickly found that taxis were beyond his means, unless he cared to spend his fortune on a fortnight’s transport. Thus, perhaps for the good of his soul, he familiarized himself with methods of demo- cratic travel alien to his nature and his habits. At one custom his soul revolted. He would not wear his ticket in his hatband. The fact of being swallowed up, an unimportant unit, in perpetual crowds, at once fas- cinated and confused him. Hitherto such grey-faced, hurrying folk had been far apart from his existence. His idea of congested traffic had been limited to the square mile or so of the West End of London; his no- tion of crowds confined to the return, generally by motor-car, from a big race-meeting or a football match. He had viewed, from the door of a first-class carriage, 189 190 PERELLA excursion trains packed with perspiring people, and wondered how the poor devils could stand it. He found that all the inhabitants of New York, except the very wealthy—and even millionaires could not afford the time to get from their millionaire homes above Central Park to Wall Street by automobile—crammed them- selves into trains underground and overhead, and into the tram-cars ceaselessly clanging up and down the great avenues. The whole day of New York reminded him of the dreadful six o’clock exodus from the city when he had tried, for a few months, to attune himself to the discords of the office of Messrs. Blake, Bislett and Smith. He was bewildered by a thousand unfamiliar things. It seemed so absurd not to be able to call for beer or light wine at a restaurant; so demoralizingly vicious to drink a friend’s cocktails or whisky behind closed doors. The standard of living awed him. These people, great and small, thought in dollars as he had of late thought in lire and francs. There were no poor. Even the humblest of his acquaintances possessed automobiles, and only forbore to use them because there was no room for them in the crowded streets. The racy, allusive talk bewildered him; the frantic interest everyone seemed to take in unintelligible politics. Personalities —Senators, Judges, Mayors, State Governors, Wash- ington officials, Presidents of Companies and Universi- ties—of whom he had but vaguely heard, assumed in conversation vivid importance, world-shaking influence. And everybody seemed to be a personal friend of the President of the United States. It was only when he found himself alone and held his racking head between his hands, that he realized that America was a mighty big country, and that these personalities, nebulous to him, directed, consciously or unconsciously, the desti- BEATRICE 191 nies of more of mankind than even inhabited the Amer- ican continent. He was bewildered, too, by the eager hospitality of all to whom, in a decent way, he was accredited. Bea- trice Ellison opened drawing-rooms of distinguished la- dies who, in their turn, opened others. Through Cor- nelius Adams’s introduction to the Players’, he went the round of the pleasant clubs, the Lotus, the Lambs, the St. Nicholas, and became a member of one or two un- housed lunching clubs. Although welcomed, invited to dinners and dances and suppers and parties and male reunions, he yet found himself a stranger in a strange city. ““What’s the matter?” said Beatrice, one day. “T never knew what astigmatism was before. Now I do. Every line I know to be straight and parallel with others is going about in front of my eyes like forked lightning. I need properly corrective lenses.” She laughed in her lazy way. “TY think you are the first Englishman who has come over and, finding things difficult to understand, has laid the blame on himself and not on America.” “It’s only a criminal lunatic,” he cried, “who would blame a country where everybody is suffocating him with kindness.” ** ‘Suffocating’—doesn’t that imply a bit of blame?” He rose—he was in her drawing-room—and flung eut his arms. “My dearest Madonna, don’t be so literal. Well, perhaps I do feel overwhelmed. Here am I, an obscure artist, an Englishman, and everywhere—I know thanks to you—I’m received with open arms. And I stand in the perfectly charming embrace and feel that I’m a sort of odd lizard mistaken for a man.” “You are a man, my dear,” said Beatrice, “and a 192 PERELLA man, provided he’s white in both senses of the word, is always welcomed in our country.” “Madonna Consolatrix,” said he. She was, indeed, his consoler in that queer sensitive civilization of an unfamiliar scale of values. “Were I,”? said he once tocher, “the ordinary young Englishman coming out with good introductions in or- der to enjoy myself, I shouldn’t worry about anything, and I should have the time of my life. But I’ve got to earn my living, my bread and butter. I’ve got every- thing to learn. I’m up against it. Don’t you see?” “Tf you realize that, it’s half the battle. You’ve only got to make good.” “Do you think I can?” “Tf I didn’t, do you suppose I should have brought you here? And you’re beginning to do it.” Again the lady of consolation. Under the auspices of Beatrice and Cornelius Adams he had already found himself doing a few portraits. His young gaiety, and his easy manner of the well-bred man of the world, no doubt weighed down the balance in the mind of hesitating sitters. He had the gift of talking amusingly while he worked, thus converting a sitting from an hour’s stiff boredom into a few quickly passing moments of laughter. A dull, scrubby fellow, with twice his talent, would not have had half his chance. This, perhaps, Anthony did not realize. He was a modest youth, devoid of self-consciousness. He was bred in a world where one laughed and talked and made oneself agreeable without thinking anything more about it. As a human being he took himself for granted. But as an artist, he abased himself before his own standard, often with terror-stricken misgiv- ing. He still felt sick at the thought of his adventure with the Duchesse de Montfaucon. In the making of BEATRICE 193 the first few portraits, he sweated the blood of his soul. Cornelius Adams, bluff, florid, good-humoured, was always a force behind him. He proposed a studio, right away up town, shrewdly saying: “People will think ten times more of you—and peo- ple’s opinions are, as a general rule, translatable into dollars—if they’ve got to come to you instead of your going to them.” Anthony explained that a fashionable studio was as remote from his financial possibilities as a steam yacht. “Don’t worry,” said Cornelius. “Ill fix it up. On a business basis, of course. Come round with me to my attorney the day after to-morrow, and we’ll draw up a little agreement.” Anthony expressed his gratitude. “But why re Cornelius Adams laughed. “Put it that I just like you. I liked you from the moment you accosted me in Florence and asked where you could get a cocktail.” “It was awful cheek,” said Anthony. ‘The same thing can be done impudently, or with an air. ... You assumed at once that I was one of the cognoscenti.” “You and everybody are a damned sight too kind to me,” said Anthony. Thus he became more than ever bewildered, spending his nights in the obscure eyrie which his purse com- pelled, and his days in the comfortably furnished studio - of a pastellist who was going round the world. Unseen influences caused a magazine editor to send for him. A fantastic story needed illustration, and the editor was trying to discover the new note that would express the fantasy. Would Mr. Blake care to sub- mit a couple of drawings without prejudice? Anthony took away a typescript copy and set to work in his new 194 PERELLA studio, feeling that, at last, the Great Opportunity had come. A fortnight afterwards a crushed and humbled artist sat in Beatrice Ellison’s drawing-room, declar- ing himself the most incompetent dog who had ever mis- taken his vocation. The bitter months of winter passed. He knew what it was to go about in over-shoes, the galoshes only fa- miliar to an English mind through curates in ancient farcical comedies, along streets of snow piled four feet high on the kerb, with here and there a hewn outlet; what it was to linger cowardly in a room’s delicious warmth, dreading the moment when he should have to emerge into the icy air. And yet, there was a strange exhilaration in it all. Pulses throbbed, brain was clear, work was easy. His little show of portraits and pencil drawings— Breton and Hungarian types—had been encouraging. There had actually been sales. . . . By February he found that he could earn enough to support himself, if not in comfort, at least in decency, while paying Cor- nelius Adams for the studio according to the terms of the contract. But the fortune that would be available for peacocks and Perella was as far as ever from at- tainment. And Perella? He had written protesting against the terms of the nurse’s curt note. He had received no reply. As a salve to conscience he sent a cable: “Ts this really the end?” To which he received the reply: “La commedia é finita.” He shrugged his shoulders. Well, that was the end of a romantically impossible episode. She had defi- nitely turned him down. The play was played out. Everybody, man and woman, made mistakes in hfe, and BEATRICE 195 the frank recognition of the fact, as in this case, obvi- ated tragedy. ‘This final cable filled him with immense relief. He held her dear in his memory as a strange ultra-human thing, a laugh, a sprite, a will-o’-the-wisp lucency; but as the woman who would march with his ambitions triumphant through the cohorts of the women of the great world which was his own, she had no ex- istence. Farewell, Perella, thing of fire in the spirit, of weary, pallid nothingness in the flesh, of poor Jittle cheap, drooping finery on insignificant body, as he had last beheld her at the railway station of Florence. Yet she was a memory of exquisiteness, a perfumed scarf which he would keep for ever in a secret drawer. He saw much of Beatrice Ellison, his patroness, though she sought by every delicate device in the world to disclaim such a worldly relationship. Months be- fore he had christened her Madonna, after the old Italian way. And this was much better, connoting, as it did, something of the spiritual. She worried unduly over the one room in the obscure hotel with which he professed (mendaciously, as it seemed to her) to be quite content; and she chafed at the thought of a cen- sorious world which would criticize her morals if she gave him quarters in her own roomy house. Both in Dinard and in the shooting-box near Ipolysag she had regarded him as a part of her establishment. After their leave-taking on the Customs quay, she realized with a queer gasp of pain, her prospective loneliness in spite of her cohorts of friends even then and there surrounding her. . . . Of course there was Fargus liv- ing under her roof. “But Fargus, as everyone knew, was her secretary. Nobody had even been idiot enough to find his residence there the least bit scandalous. But 196 PERELLA with regard to the charming and accomplished An- thony, it was a different matter altogether. Fargus would not dream of calling her Madonna, and she had never run her hand over Fargus’s hair and kissed him. . . . If only Emilia would come home and give the as- sociation her prim young chaperonage. But Emilia had gone mad over the study of Eugenics and the prac- tice of the simple life, and preferred, as she frankly said, being perfectly happy in Minnesota to being acutely miserable in New York. Beatrice sometimes sighed over her daughter. “YT don’t think she takes any interest in a man except anatomically,” she said. ‘What’s one to do with a girl like that?” As no one could give her adequate counsel, she left Emilia alone. But she looked forward with dread to the time when, with accrued authority, Emilia would be heading Movements and sounding Slogans and doing all such kinds of commendable yet dreadful things. At any rate, Emilia was of no use whatever. And more- over, she felt, with a little prick of shame, that should Emilia come, she would be most embarrassingly in the way. Beatrice lived in the Ellison house in Sixty-fifth Street, one in a brownstone modest row—suggestive of Bloomsbury, or an old by-water of Kensington, where once the gentry had their unostentatious habitation. On the other side of the door, however, there was re- vealed a house spacious and dignified ; large rooms, with curtained doorways, opened in to one another in pleas- ant vistas. Most of the furniture and pictures and statuary were of a bygone age, for when Emilia occa- sionally slept a night there, she was of the third gener- ation of Ellisons who had done so. “If I were you, Mother,” she said once, “I’d scrap the BEATRICE 197 whole of this mouldy stuff—it’s reeking with germs— and refurnish the place hygienically with properly chosen scientific colours.” ““When it comes into your possession, my dear,” said Beatrice, “you can do what you like. But while I’m alive, I like to look round and feel that somewhere in the world there’s something to show that there’s something at the back of us which money can’t buy.” “All right, when you’re crumpled up with ty- phoid 2 “People aren’t crumpled up with typhoid. You’re mixing it with cholera. Besides, the sanitation of the house is the last word in modernity.” Emilia bit her lip—this was two years before, when she had just started into the rosy flush of her Eugenic career. Thus it will be seen that Beatrice held the old- fashioned house in sentimental affection. Of course, it was dark and stiff, and a row of eighteenth-century ancestral samplers in the drawing-room, surmounted by a full-length portrait of Alexander Hamilton, robbed a wall of artistic joy; but, besides being com- fortable, it sounded, as one might say, an urbane proc- lamation. . . . Of course, also, after a time it got on a sensitive modern woman’s nerves. She missed the self-expression to which she had given free scope in her houses in Florence and Dinard and her little flat in Paris. Three months of New York, too, sufficed her. At the end of that time, her mind drenched with plays and operas and music and startling social dramas and great finance and the inner whirlpool of politics, she usually longed for the peace and grace of her Floren- tine home on the slopes of Fiesole. The winter went on, and the set of rooms at the top of the house, one with a good studio light which An- 198 PERELLA thony might have occupied, remained empty. And she felt peculiarly lonely in the gloomy place, in spite of the myriad calls on her time and her daily touch with the young man either by voice over the telephone, or by personal meeting in her own house or elsewhere. Once when she felt the usual call of Florence she said to him: ““Flave you ever thought that, one of these days soon, I must go back to Europe?” “I’ve tried to put it out’of my mind, as one does in- evitable things,” said he. “For God’s sake don’t talk of it till the day comes. Then ring me up, and say: ‘I’m sailing to-night.’ ” She smiled. ‘We'll have a little longer run in New York.” February still found her lingering. The January snows had melted, and milder air whispered the first promise of spring. Whether blizzards sweeping down from Arctic wastes would turn March into a torment, no man could know. In February the sky was blue and the sun shone and the road to Cornelius Adams’s comfortable house on Long Island was pleasant and the week-ends there an illusion of the South. Now, Cornelius Adams was a half-bachelor or semi- widower, seeing that he had a wife, a Detroit lady, who found that she could only live in Copenhagen. As Copenhagen bored the good Cornelius to death, and as she never expected him to go there, they had not met for a couple of years; but all the same, they were a de- voted pair, and the marriage was the happiest thing imaginable. He took her intellectual dryness—she was bent on becoming an authority on old Scandinavian literature—and her scorn of coquetry and professed dislike of children, humorously; and, as she was per- fectly contented, went along his own agreeable and BEATRICE 199 often, no doubt, secret paths, with no offence to deco- rum. ‘The amiable man had, at any rate, a genius for friendship. For Beatrice Ellison he would have fought any flame-snorting dragon you pleased. She went to him in her troubles with the eight-ninths open heart of the woman who consults a confessor. He had, as it may have been indicated, given his friendship, just be- cause he liked him, to the young man, Anthony Blake. As he gathered from her confidence that Beatrice was sighing for the companionship of Anthony, whom she could not house with her in New York, and as he took for granted Anthony’s worship of his Madonna, he had instituted week-end parties in his Long Island home to which the pair, with a sprinkling of odd guests, were invited. In the hard weather he could provide them with skating and sleighing and even a small toboggan run. ‘These week-end visits were Beatrice’s happiest days in America. Before she slept, it was a silly com- fort to her to know that Anthony was under the same roof; awaking, she looked forward to the bright face and the smile and the laughing glance round and the hasty kiss; in the evenings she looked forward to the few mancuvred moments of privacy before they retired, and the gentler kiss beyond the range of spydom; the “sood night, Madonna” and the “good night, my dear,” and the sight of him below, as she paused on the turn of the stair, gallant, waving her a last salute of hand and lips. She was happy in an idiotic way ; and her sound sense told her that the way was idiotic. She was forty-one, fifteen years older than he; but she did not look it or feel it. Her glass showed her a woman whom the world called beautiful. She had cared for skin and hair and figure, in the modern, matter-of-course way among women of her class, just as she had cared for teeth and 200 PERELLA finger nails. And she was in the resplendent health of her twenties. What did the years matter? Her heart was fresh. She had mourned for ten years the eld- erly husband who had been her friend, which, after all, was adequate suttee to expect of any woman. The most virtuous and honoured widows of her acquaintance had remarried after a conventional twelve-month or so. The frozen sap of ten years re-worked in her veins. Why shouldn’t it? And yet . . . these quivering mo- ments were so sweet and delicate, holding an unutter- able poetic charm. Could they only last in their pres- ent perfection, she would ask for nothing more. So, at least, she told herself; and, hammering into her brain the asseveration, she grew almost to believe it. On the Sunday of a February week-end at Marjoram Farm, on Long Island, they sat together in the en- trance lounge where, under a high chimney-piece, great four-foot logs of unsplit pine were burning. Through the casemented windows opposite could be seen a pale blue sky mottled by pleasant clouds, and an effect of mild and gentle sunshine. The two or three other mem- bers of the house-party had trudged off to church. Cornelius, very amateur farmer, had gone off to look, with an air of wisdom, at Rhode Island turkeys and white Wyandottes and a litter of Berkshire pigs, whose grandparents had been brought from England. An- thony had breakfasted late, with hearty appetite, and had waited with a book for Beatrice to descend. And she had come down, fresh, slim and graceful, her dark blue eyes shining under the mass of black hair that clus- tered about her brows. “You here, Anthony? Why haven’t you taken ad- vantage of the beautiful morning?” “Madonna,” said he, “‘you are the morning.” BEATRICE 201 What woman would not be glad to kiss a happy young man who had made such a pretty speech? She passed by the table on which he had thrown his book, glanced at it idly, and put it down again. It was Kinglake’s “Eothen.” She sat down. “Do you like it?” “Does one like Chambertin of an historic vintage?” She proclaimed her joy in his appreciation of a book, one of her favourites, now half-forgotten; a book of un- dying beauty. So few people nowadays seemed to have time for the beauty of a past age, and missed whatever _ there was of beauty in the present. They discussed the points in agreeable sympathy. “Which reminds me,” she said at last, “of my dear friend, Silvester—Professor Gayton, yon know. If he heard us now he’d be calling us his disciples. I’ve just had a letter from him.” Anthony politely hoped that he was well. *“He’s more than well. He’s radiantly happy. He’s married.” - “Married!” cried Anthony. ‘Why, he must be get- ing on for seventy.” “Silly! I happen to know that he’s fifty-five.” He might be anything, Anthony conceded. He asked idly, not very greatly interested in the matrimo- nial affairs of Professor Gayton: ‘“Who’s the lady?” But Beatrice, woman-like, was, on the contrary vastly interested. The permutations and combinations of human destinies never presented anything more ro- mantic.