The Glory of Clementina Wing

CHAPTER II-2

She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled nothing so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture was the stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of Tomkins, Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a corner stood a spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff. The room afforded Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except when she received puzzled visitors she rarely sat in it from one year’s end to the other.

“I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he bent over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s prehistoric man getting on?”

“As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”

Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a sallow complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on the crown of his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant moustache gave his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick eye noted it at once. She screwed up her face and watched him.

“I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were clean shaven,” she said brusquely.

“I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”

“Why not?”

He started in alarm.

“I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the guise in which he presided over them.”

“Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a touch of irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”

“Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff Sheraton chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since we last met, Clementina. You are famous. I wonder what it feels like to be a celebrity.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “In my case it feels like leading apes in hell. By the way, when did I last see you?”

“It was at poor Angela’s funeral, five years ago.”

“So it was,” said Clementina.

There was a short silence. Angela was his dead wife and her distant relation.

“What has become of Will Hammersley?” she asked suddenly. “He has given up writing to me.”

“Still in Shanghai, I think. He went out, you know, to take over the China branch of his firm—just before Angela’s death, wasn’t it? It’s a couple of years or more since I have heard from him.”

“That’s strange; he was an intimate friend of yours,” said Clementina.

“The only intimate friend I’ve ever had in my life. We were at school and at Cambridge together. Somehow, although I have many acquaintances and, so to speak, friends, yet I’ve never formed the intimacies that most men have. I suppose,” he added, with a sweet smile, “it’s because I’m rather a dry stick.”

“You’re ten years older than your age,” said Clementina, frankly. “You want shaking up. It’s a pity Will Hammersley isn’t here. He used to do you a lot of good.”

“I’m glad you think so much of Hammersley,” said Quixtus.

“I don’t think much of most people, do I?” she said. “But Hammersley was a friend in need. He was to me, at any rate.”

“Are you still fond of Sterne?” he asked. “I think you are the only woman who ever was.”

She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking,” he said, in his quiet, courtly way, “that we have many bonds of sympathy, after all; Angela, Hammersley, Sterne, and my scapegrace nephew, Tommy.”

“Tommy is a good boy,” said Clementina, “and he’ll learn to paint some day.”

“I must thank you for your very great kindness to him.”

“Bosh!” said Clementina.

“It’s a great thing for a young fellow—wild and impulsive like Tommy—to have a good friend in a woman older than himself.”

“If you think, my good man,” snapped Clementina, reverting to her ordinary manner, “that I look after his morals, you are very much mistaken. What has it got to do with me if he kisses models and takes them out to dinner in Soho?”

The lingering Eve in her resented the suggestion of a maternal attitude towards the boy. After all, she was not five-and-fifty; she was younger, five years younger than the stick of an uncle who was talking to her as if he had stepped out of the pages of a Sunday-school prize.

“He never tells me of the models,” replied Quixtus, “and I’m very glad he tells you. It shows there is no harm in it.”

“Let us talk sense,” said Clementina, “and not waste time. You’ve come to me to have your portrait painted. I’ve been looking at you. I think a half-length, sitting down, would be the best—unless you want to stand up in evening-dress behind a table, with presidential gold chains and badges of office and hammers and water-bottles——”

“Heaven forbid!” cried Quixtus, who was as modest a man as ever stepped. “What you suggest will quite do.”

“I suppose you will wear that frock-coat and turn-down collar? Don’t you ever wear a narrow black tie?”

“My dear Clementina,” he cried horrified, “I may not be the latest thing in dandyism, but I’ve no desire to look like a Scotch deacon in his Sunday clothes.”

“Vanity again,” said Clementina. “I could have got something much better out of you in a narrow black tie. Still, I daresay I’ll manage—though what your bone-digging friends want with a portrait of you at all for, I’m blest if I can understand.”

With which gracious remark she dismissed him, after having arranged a date for the first sitting.

“A poor creature,” muttered Clementina, when the door closed behind him.

The poor creature, however, walked smartly homewards through the murky November evening, perfectly contented with God and man—even with Clementina herself. In this well-ordered world, even the tongue of an eccentric woman must serve some divine purpose. He mused whimsically on the purpose. Well, at any rate, she belonged to a dear and regretted past, which without throwing an absolute glamour around Clementina still shed upon her its softening rays. His thoughts were peculiarly retrospective this evening. It was a Tuesday, and his Tuesday nights for some years had been devoted to a secret and sacred gathering of pale ghosts. His Tuesday nights were mysteries to all his friends. When pressed for the reason of this perennial weekly engagement, he would say vaguely; “It’s a club to which I belong.” But what was the nature of the club, what the grim and ghastly penalty if he skipped a meeting, those were questions which he left, with a certain innocent mirth, to the conjecture of the curious.

The evening was fine, with a touch of shrewdness in the air. He found himself in the exhilarated frame of mind which is consonant with brisk walking. He looked at his watch. He could easily reach Russell Square by seven o’clock. He timed his walk exactly. It was five minutes to seven when he let himself in by his latchkey. The parlour-maid, emerging from the dining-room, met him in the hall and helped him off with his coat.

“The gentlemen have come, sir.”

“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus, self-reproachfully.

“They’re before their time. It isn’t seven yet, sir,” said the parlour-maid, flinging the blame upon the gentlemen. In speaking of them she had just the slightest little supercilious tilt of the nose.

Quixtus waited until she had retired, then, drawing something from his own pocket, he put something into the pocket of each of three greatcoats that hung in the hall. After that he ran upstairs into the drawing-room. Three men rose to receive him.

“How do you do, Huckaby? So glad to see you, Vandermeer. My dear Billiter.”

He apologised for being late. They murmured excuses for being early. Quixtus asked leave to wash his hands, went out and returned rubbing them, as though in anticipation of enjoyment. Two of the men standing in front of the fire made way for him. He thrust them back courteously.

“No, no, I’m warm. Been walking for miles. I’ve not seen an evening paper. What’s the news?”

Quixtus never saw an evening paper on Tuesdays. The question was a time-honoured opening to the kindly game he played with his guests.

Now there is a reason for most things, even for a parlour-maid’s tilt of the nose. The personal appearance of the guests would have tilted the nose of any self-respecting parlour-maid in Russell Square. They were a strange trio. All were shabby and out-at-elbows. All wore the insecure, apologetic collar which is one of the most curious badges of the down-at-heel. All bore on their faces the signs of privation and suffering; Huckaby, lantern-jawed, black-bearded and watery-eyed; Vandermeer, small, decrepit, pinched of feature, with crisp, sparse red hair and the bright eyes of a hungry wolf; Billiter, the flabby remains of a heavily built florid man, with a black moustache turning grey. They were ghosts of the past, who once a week came back to the plentiful earth, lived for a few brief hours in the land that had been their heritage, talked of the things they had once loved, and went forth (so Quixtus hoped) cheered and comforted for their next week’s wandering on the banks of Acheron. Once a week they sat at a friend’s table and ate generous food, drank generous wine, and accepted help from a friend’s generous hand. Help they all needed, and like desperate men would snatch it from any hand held out to them. Huckaby had been a successful coach at Cambridge; Vandermeer, who had forsaken early in life a banking office for the Temple of Literary Fame, had starved for years on free-lance journalism; Billiter, of Rugby and Oxford, had run through a fortune. All waste products of the world’s factory. Among the many things they had in common was an unquenchable thirst, which they dissimulated in Russell Square; but they made up for it by patronising their host. When a beneficiary is humble he is either deserving or has touched the lowest depths of degradation.

Quixtus presided happily at the meal. With strangers he was shy and diffident; but here he was at his ease, among old friends none the less valued because they had fallen by the wayside. Into the reason of their fall it did not concern him to inquire. All that mattered was their obvious affection and the obvious brightness that fortune had enabled him to shed on their lives.

“I wonder,” said he, with one of his sudden smiles, “I wonder if you fellows know how I prize these evenings of ours.”

“They’re Attic Symposia,” said Huckaby.

“I’ve been thinking of a series of articles on them, after the manner of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,” said Vandermeer.

“They would quite bear it,” Huckaby agreed. “I think we get better talk here than anywhere else I know. I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,”—he rolled out the alliterative phrase with great sonority—“and I know the talk in the Combination Room; but it’s pedantic—pedantic. Not ripe and mellow like ours.”

“I’m not a brainy chap like you others,” said Billiter, wiping his dragoon’s moustache, “but I like to have my mind improved, now and then.”

“Do you know the Noctes, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus. “Of course you do. What do you think of them?”

“I suppose you like them,” replied Huckaby, “because you are an essentially scientific and not a literary man. But I think them dull.”

“I don’t call them dull,” Quixtus argued, “but to my mind they’re pretentious. I don’t like their sham heartiness, their slap-on-the-back-and-how-are-you-old-fellow tone, their impossible Pantagruelian banquets——”

The hungry wolf’s face of Vandermeer lit up. “That’s what I like about them—the capons—the pies—the cockaleeky—the haggises——”

“I remember a supper-party at Oxford,” said Billiter, “when there was a haggis, and one chap who was awfully tight insisted that a haggis ought to be turned like an omelette or tossed like a pancake. He tossed it. My God! You never saw such a thing in your life!”

So they all talked according to the several necessities of their natures, and at last Quixtus informed his guests that he was to sit for his portrait to Miss Clementina Wing.

“I believe she is really quite capable,” said Huckaby, judicially, stroking his straggling beard.

“I know her,” cried Vandermeer. “A most charming woman.”

Quixtus raised his eyebrows.

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said he. “She is a sort of distant connection of mine by marriage.”

“I interviewed her,” said Vandermeer.

“Good Lord!” The exclamation on the part of Quixtus was inaudible.

“I was doing a series of articles—very important articles,” said Vandermeer, with an assertive glance around the table, “on Women Workers of To-day, and of course Miss Clementina Wing came into it. I called and put the matter before her.”

He paused dramatically.

“And then?” asked Quixtus amused.

“We went out to lunch in a restaurant and she gave me all the material necessary for my article. A most charming woman, who I think will do you justice, Quixtus.”

When his friends had gone, each, by the way, diving furtive and searching hands into their great-coat pockets, as soon as they had been helped into these garments by the butler—and here, by the way also, be it stated that, no matter how sultry the breath of summer or how frigid that of fortune, they never failed to bring overcoats to hang, for all the world like children’s stockings for Santa Claus, on the familiar pegs—when his friends were gone, Quixtus, who had an elementary sense of humour, failed entirely to see an expansive and notoriety-seeking Clementina lunching tête-à-tête at the Carlton or the Savoy with Theodore Vandermeer. In point of fact, he fell asleep smiling at the picture.