hugh massinger, esq., was a person of some distinction as a novelist, and an æsthetic dabbler in gothic mysteries. his novel “the torch lily” had had a great sale, especially in the united states, where an enthusiastic reviewer had compared it to flaubert’s “salambo.” hugh massinger had edited “marie de france” and the “romance of the rose,” issued an abridged “froissart,” and published books on “the mediæval colour-sense,” and “the higher love of provence.” his poems, sensuous, swinburnian fragments, full of purple sunsets and precious stones, roses, red mouths and white bosoms had fascinated some of those erotic and over-civilised youngsters who turn from kipling as from raw meat.
when miss champion offered eve the post of secretary to hugh massinger, she accepted it as a piece of unexpected good fortune, for it seemed to be the very berth that she had hoped for, but feared to get.
miss champion said some characteristic things.
“of course, you know who mr. massinger is? yes. you have read ‘the torch lily’? a little bold, but so full of colour. i must warn you that he is just a trifle eccentric. you are to call and see him at ten o’clock to-morrow at his flat in purbeck street. the terms are two pounds a week, which, of course, includes my commission.”
“i am very grateful to you, miss champion. i hope i shall satisfy mr. massinger.”
miss champion looked at her meaningly.
“the great thing, miss carfax, is to be impersonal. always the work, and nothing but the work. that is how my protegées have always succeeded.”
eve concluded that hugh massinger was rather young.
miss champion had stated that he was eccentric, but it was not the kind of eccentricity that eve had expected to find in purbeck street. a youngish manservant with a bleached and dissolute face showed her into a long room that was hung from floor to ceiling with black velvet. the carpet was a pure white pile, and with the ceiling made the room look like a black box fitted with a white bottom and lid. there was only one window, and no furniture beyond a lounge covered with blood-red velvet, two bronze bowls on hammered iron pedestals, an antique oak table, two joint-stools, and a very finely carved oak court-cupboard in one corner. the fire burnt in an iron brazier standing in an open fireplace. there were no mirrors in the room, and on each square of the black velvet hangings a sunflower was embroidered in gold silk. heraldic glass had been inserted into the centre panels of the window, and in the recess a little silver tripod lamp burnt with a bluish flame, and gave out a faint perfume.
eve had walked from kate duveen’s. it was the usual wet day, and the streets were muddy, and as she sat on the joint-stool the valet had offered her she saw that she had left footprints on the white pile carpet. it seemed rather an unpropitious beginning, bringing london mud into this eccentric gentleman’s immaculate room.
she was still looking at the footprints, when the black hangings were pushed aside, and a long, thin, yellow-faced young man appeared. he was wrapped in a black velvet dressing-gown, and wore sandals.
“miss carfax, i presume?”
eve had risen.
“yes.”
“please sit down. i’m afraid i am rather late this morning.”
any suggestion of subtle and decadent wickedness that the room possessed was diluted by hugh massinger’s appearance. there was a droopingness about him, and his face was one of those long yellow faces that fall away in flaccid curves from the forehead to the chin. his nose drooped at the tip, his eyes were melancholy under drooping lids; his chin receded, and lost itself rather fatuously in a length of thin neck. his hair was of the same tint as his smooth, sand-coloured face, where a brownish moustache rolled over a wet mouth. he stooped badly, and his shoulders were narrow.
“i called on miss champion some days ago. my work requires special ability. shall i explain?”
“please.”
he smiled like an oriental, and, curling himself on the lounge, brought a black metal cigarette case out of the pocket of his dressing-gown.
“do you mind if i smoke?”
“not in the least.”
“perhaps you will join me?”
“i’m afraid i don’t.”
she was surprised when he laughed a rather foolish laugh.
“that’s quite a phrase, ‘the women who don’t!’ i keep a toyshop for phrases.”
he puffed his cigarette and began to explain the work to her in a soft and sacramental voice that somehow made her want to laugh. he talked as though he were reading blank-verse or some prose poem that was full of mysterious precocity. but she forgot his sing-song voice in becoming conscious of his eyes. they were moonish and rather muddy, and seemed to be apprizing her, looking her up and down and in and out with peculiar interest. she did not like hugh massinger’s eyes. they made her feel that she was being touched.
“i am writing a book on mediæval life, especially in regard to its æsthetic values. there is a good deal of research to be done, and old illustrations, illuminations and tapestries to be reproduced. it is to be a big book, quite comprehensive.”
eve soon discovered that hugh massinger could not be impersonal in anything that he undertook. the “i” “i” “i” oozed out everywhere.
“miss champion assured me that you are a fine colourist. colour is the blood of life. that is why people who are colour mystics can wear black. the true colour, like the blood, is underneath. i noticed, directly i came into the room, that you were wearing black. it convinced me at once that you would be a sympathetic worker. my art requires sympathy.”
she smiled disarmingly.
“i’m afraid my black is conventional.”
“i should say that it is not. i suppose you have worked in the museum?”
“for two or three months.”
“deathly place! how life goes to dust and to museums! i’ll not ask you to go there more than i can help.”
his melancholy eyes drooped over her, and filled her with a determination to be nothing but practical. she thought of kate duveen.
“it’s my work, and i’m used to it.”
“the place kills me.”
“i don’t mind it at all. i think most of us need a certain amount of work to do that we don’t like doing, because, if we can always do what we like, we end by doing nothing.”
he blinked at her.
“now, i never expected to hear you say that. it is so very british.”
“i make a living in england!” and she laughed. “will you tell me exactly what you want me to do?”
massinger gathered himself up from the lounge, went to the oak cupboard, and brought out a manuscript book covered with black velvet, and with the inevitable sunflower embroidered on it.
“i had better give you a list of the books i want you to dip into.”
eve took a notebook and a pencil from her bag, and for the next ten minutes she was kept busy scribbling down ancient and unfamiliar titles. many of them smelt of caxton, and wynkyn de worde, and of the elizabethans. there were books on hunting, armour, dress, domestic architecture, painted glass, ivories and enamels; also herbals, chap-books, monastic chronicles, exchequer rolls and copies of charters. hugh massinger might be an æsthetic ass, but he seemed to be a somewhat learned one.
“i think you will map out the days as follows: in the morning i will ask you to go to the museum and make notes and drawings. in the afternoon you can submit them to me here, and i will select what i require, and advise you as to what to hunt up next day. i suppose you won’t mind answering some of my letters?”
“miss champion said that i was to act as your secretary.”
“blessed word! i am pestered with letters. they tried to get me to manage several of those silly pageants. they don’t understand the middle ages, these moderns.”
she wanted to keep to practical things.
“what time shall i go to the museum?”
he stared.
“i never worry about time—when you like.”
“and how long will you want me here?”
“i never work after five o’clock, except, of course, when i feel creative.”
she stood up, putting her notebook back into her bag.
“then, shall i start to-morrow?”
“if it pleases you.”
“of course.”
he accompanied her to the door, and opened it for her, looking with half furtive intentness into her face.
“i think we shall get on very well together, miss carfax.”
“i hope so.”
she went out with a vague feeling of contempt and distaste.
within a week eve discovered that she was growing interested in her new work, and also interested, in a negative fashion, in hugh massinger. he was a rather baffling person, impressing her as a possible genius and as a palpable fool. she usually found him curled up on the lounge, smoking a hookah, and looking like an oriental, sinister and sleepy. for some reason or other, his smile made her think of a brass plate that had not been properly cleaned, and was smeary. once or twice the suspicion occurred to her that he took drugs.
but directly he began to use his brain towards some definite end, she felt in the presence of a different creature. his eyes lost their sentimental moonishness; his thin and shallow hands seemed to take a virile grip; his voice changed, and his mouth tightened. the extraordinary mixture of matter that she brought back from the museum jumbled in her notes was seized on and sorted, and spread out with wonderful lucidity. his knowledge astonished her, and his familiarity with monkish latin and norman french and early english. the complex, richly coloured life of the middle ages seemed to hang before him like a splendid tapestry. he appeared to know every fragment of it, every shade, every faded incident, and he would take the tangle of threads she brought him and knot them into their places with instant precision. his favourite place was on the lounge, his manuscript books spread round him while he jotted down a fact here and there, or sometimes recorded a whole passage.
but directly his intellectual interest relaxed he became flabby, sentimental, and rather fulsome in his personalities. the manservant would bring in tea, and massinger would insist on eve sharing it with him. he always drank china tea, and it reminded her of fernhill, and the teas in the gardens, only the two men were so very different. massinger had a certain playfulness, but it was the playfulness of a cat. his pale, intent eyes made her uncomfortable. she did not mind listening while he talked about himself, but when he tried to lure her into giving him intimate matter in return, she felt mute, and on her guard.
this new life certainly allowed her more leisure, for there were afternoons when hugh massinger did not work at all, and eve went home early to bosnia road. on these afternoons she managed to snatch an hour’s daylight, but the stuff she produced did not please her. she had all the craftsman’s discontent in her favour, but the glow seemed to have gone out of her colours.
kate duveen wanted to know all about hugh massinger. she had read some of his poetry, and thought it “erotic tosh.”
eve was quite frank.
“he interests me, but i don’t like him.”
“why not?”
“instinct! some people don’t strike one as being clean.”
she described the black velvet room, and the way massinger dressed. kate’s nostrils dilated.
“faugh, that sort of fool! do you mean to say he receives you in a dressing-gown and sandals?”
“it is part of the pose.”
“i wonder why it is that when a man is clever in the artistic way, he so often behaves like an ass? i thought the art pose was dying out. can you imagine bergson, or ross, or treves, or nansen, dressing up and scenting themselves and sitting on a divan? people who play with words seem to get tainted, and too beastly self-conscious.”
“he rather amuses me.”
“do his lips drop honey? if there is one kind of man i hate it’s the man who talks clever, sentimental slosh.”
“i don’t encourage the honey.”
kate came in flushed one day to the little corner table they frequented in one of lyons’s shops. it was an unusual thing for kate to be flushed, or to show excitement. something had happened.
“great news?”
her eyes shone.
“i’ve got it at last.”
“your travelling berth?”
“yes. a serious-minded young widow wants a travelling companion, secretary, etc. rage for cosmopolitan colour, pictures and peoples. we begin with egypt, go on to the holy land, damascus, constantinople. then back to the south of france, do provence and the towns and châteaux, wander down to italy and sicily, and just deign to remember the tyrol and germany on the way home. it’s gorgeous!”
eve flushed too.
“kate, i am glad.”
“my languages did it! she can speak french, but no german or italian. and the pay’s first-class. i always wanted to specialise in this sort of vagabondage.”
“you’ll write books!”
“who knows! we must celebrate. we’ll dine at the hotel d’italie, and go and see pavlova at the palace. it’s my day.”
despite her delight in kate’s good fortune, eve had a personal regret haunting the background of her consciousness. kate duveen was her one friend in london. she would miss her bracing, cynical strength.
they dined at the hotel d’italie in one of the little upper rooms, and kate talked italian to the waiters, and made eve drink her health in very excellent barolo. she had been lucky in getting seats at the palace, two reserved tickets having been sent back only ten minutes before she had called.
eve had never seen pavlova before, and the black-coated and conventional world melted out of her consciousness as she sat and watched the russian dancer. that fragile, magical, childlike figure seemed to have been conceived in the heart of a white flame. it was life, and all the strange and manifold suggestions of life vibrating and glowing in one slight body. eve began to see visions, as she sat in the darkness and watched pavlova moving to chopin’s music. pictures flashed and vanished, moods expressed in colour. the sun went down behind black pine woods, and a wind wailed. a half-naked girl dressed in skins and vine leaves fled from the brown arms of a young barbarian. a white butterfly flitted among syrian roses. she heard bees at work, birds singing in the dawn. and then, it was the pale ghost of francesca drifting through the moonlight with death in her eyes and hair.
then the woman’s figure was joined by a man’s figure, and liszt’s second hungarian rhapsody was in the air. the motive changed. something bacchic, primitive, passionate leapt in the blood. eve sat thrilled, with half-closed eyes. those two figures, the woman’s and the man’s, seemed to rouse some wild, elemental spirit in her, to touch an undreamt-of subconsciousness that lay concealed under the workaday life. desire, the exultation of desire, and the beauty of it were very real to her. she felt breathless and ready to weep.
when it was over, and she and kate were passing out with the crowd, a kind of languor descended on her, like the languor that comes after the senses have been satisfied. it was not a sensual feeling, although it was of the body. kate too was silent. pavlova’s dancing had reacted on her strangely.
“let’s walk!”
“would you rather?”
“yes.”
“as far as my rooms. then i shall put you in a taxi.”
they had to wait awhile before crossing the road, as motors were swarming up.
“that woman’s a genius. she made me feel like a rusty bit of clockwork!”
“she had a most extraordinary effect on me!”
kate took eve’s arm.
“the thing’s pure, absolutely pure, and yet, she seems to show you what you never believed was in you. it’s the soul of the world coming out to dance, and making you understand all that is in us women. heavens, i found myself feeling like a greek girl, a little drunk with wine, and still more drunk with love.”
“kate—you!”
“yes, and it was not beastly, as those things usually are. i’m not an emotional person. i suppose it is the big subconscious creature in one answering a language that our clever little heads don’t understand.”
eve was thinking.
“i envy that woman!”
“why?”
“because she has a genius, and because she has been able to express her genius, and because she has succeeded in conquering the crowd. they don’t know how clever she is, but they go and see her dance. think what it means being a supreme artist, and yet popular. for once the swine seem to appreciate the pearl.”
they were making their way through a crowd of loiterers at the corner of tottenham court road, when a tall man brushed against them and stepped aside. he wore a black wideawake hat, a low collar with a bunchy black silk tie, and a loose black coat with a tuberose in the buttonhole. he stared first at kate, and then at eve with a queer, comprehensive, apprizing stare. suddenly he took off his hat.
the women passed on.
“beast!”
kate’s mouth was iron.
“that was hugh massinger.”
“hugh massinger!”
“yes.”
“eve, i said ‘beast,’ and i still mean it.”
“your impression?”
“yes. i don’t think old champion ought to have sent you to that sort of man.”
