Then his mood suddenly changed. A mischievous spirit of schoolboy levity took possession of him. Confound the woman! he thought. What right has she to talk to me like this? And in order to see what she would do, and out of pure maliciousness, he burst out with what was in his mind.
‘You’ll be pleased, then, I expect,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that I’ve decided to travel with Nelly for a bit.’
Mrs Shotover did indeed look startled. ‘Oh excellent! very excellent!’ she cried. On the Continent, I suppose? To Paris first, no doubt, and then to Switzerland? I am delighted you can afford to give my dear child this happiness!’
‘I think of taking Nelly to America,’ he said, with a malicious emphasis. ‘Robert Canyot has some exhibitions to look after over there; and he has persuaded us to go with him.’
Mrs Shotover did indeed show ‘the mettle of her pastures’ at that moment. She became extremely quiet, and flicked a horse-fly from the flank of her impatient steed.
‘Ah!’ she muttered, drawing in her breath with a little hissing sound. ‘Ah really!’
‘Yes; we think of going quite soon. Nelly will be sorry to leave Hill Cottage of course. But we may be able to let it for a few months. We are both so interested in Mr Canyot’s success.’
In her heart Mrs Shotover thought bitterly — Who is the one to be exploited in this abominable affair? What a couple of ill-bred cads these fellows are! Poor, poor, poor Nelly! But aloud she only said, ‘How nice it is for the dear child to have two men of genius to support her! I expect you and Mr Canyot will both find America very much to your taste. I hope Nelly will. It’s rather a terrible place isn’t it? But no doubt there are some nice people there. You won’t get anything to drink, of course, but I suppose none of you will mind that. What’s their word for those horrid mixtures they all swallow? Soft drinks! Well, I hope you’ll enjoy the soft drinks, Mr Storm. But don’t kill my dear child between you. Give her my love, please! Goodbye.’ And she flicked her horse viciously and was off at a gallop, almost throwing Mr Thomas into Richard’s arms.
She had successfully destroyed the filmy threads of his meditation. ‘It is to escape from women like that,’ he said to himself, ‘that people emigrate. Oh England, England, you certainly allow many troublesome persons many strange privileges!’
Chapter 13
The newly broadened Varick Street, now a continuation of Seventh Avenue, is one of the most characteristic thoroughfares in New York. It is characteristic of that city by reason of a queer blending of the dilapidated ‘old’ with the harshly and rawly ‘new’. The old is indeed rapidly disappearing, but it lingers on in a diffusion of chaotic litter; bits of ancient Dutch houses, roofs and sheds, old wooden walls, little ramshackle staircases, fragments of antiquated sidewalks and old tobacconist and barber shops, clinging pathetically enough to the great new erections, just as the small narrow streets in that vicinity seem themselves to cling with a tenacious persistence to the huge new thoroughfare that cuts its proud straight path through the middle of them.
It was at the corner of Charlton Street and Varick Street that Richard and Nelly at last installed themselves.
They had a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom and a kitchen, on the second floor of a small house that must have been at least a hundred years old.
The place was already furnished; and they possessed themselves of it on the understanding that they could leave it when they pleased.
Robert Canyot had taken a studio on a year’s lease in another part of the city; in a street adjoining Central Park, of whose trees he could catch a distant view as he worked.
Nelly had found the heat of New York with its accompanying humidity rather exhausting when she first arrived, but the amusement and interest of housekeeping under these new conditions prevented her from losing her good spirits.
Her first view of the great group of colossal buildings gathered round the Woolworth Tower, as they entered the harbour more than a month ago, had been forever associated in her mind with the discovery that she was to be a mother.
She could see that same Woolworth Tower as soon as she left her little apartment and turned into Varick Street; for Varick Street led straight into the city district and lost itself among those iron and marble monsters.
It always struck her when each day she saw the huge erection as she went on her housekeeping errands that the thing resembled some gigantic temple, built to some new god of this new world, a god who demanded the service of innumerable men and women but whose own especial angels and chosen ministers were things of iron and stone and steam and electricity.
It a little terrified her sometimes to think that she was destined to stay in New York until her child was born; but they had let Hill Cottage before they left England; Grace had married her young man; it would have meant an uncomfortable hunt for a new abode if she insisted on returning. She had no desire that her child be born in America, but she dreaded, in her nervous state of health, the effort of the voyage.
There were other more subtle reasons to account for her acquiescence when Richard proposed to take this apartment. She associated Hill Cottage with that fatal letter from Paris and it pleased her to think that New York was further away from Paris than was that little garden where she had inhaled, together with the scent of white phloxes, her first taste of the cruelty of sex jealousy.
And she had a longing, too, that she might put off her return to her father’s grave till she had received — as she believed she would receive in time — some sort of absolution for what she regarded as her sin in neglecting him when she first married.
If I’d married Robert, she thought, it would have been to give Father a home. I did give him a home with Richard; but it wasn’t the same. It was for my own pleasure, and I hardly saw anything of him during those weeks.
In the subtle workings of her brain she had come to associate her Littlegate haunts with a certain complicated sadness — the sadness of her first taste of the bitterness of life and the sadness of her father’s wasted powers.
The upbraiding shadow of Mrs Shotover also menaced her from those Sussex fields. I suppose I ought not to have let her go, she thought. I suppose I was cruel. But she was impossible. She was mad.
In spite of her nervous condition and in spite of certain moods of timid apprehension as to all that was before her, Nelly was really extremely happy during those hot airless days. She suffered physically from the heat; but her husband had never been mentally so close to her; their mutual interest in their new surroundings seeming to have brought them together on a deeper plane.
She was very happy too in her frequent visits to Canyot’s uptown studio; and the conversation about life and art which she had with the young painter, seated by his side in some gallery of the Metropolitan Museum or on a bench in the Central Park, lifted her out of herself into regions which she had never supposed she would be able to enter.
She admitted Canyot into the secret of her condition with a sure feminine instinct as to the effect the news would have upon him. And in this she was completely justified. The final loss of her, in a physical sense, thus emphasized by her prospect of motherhood, seemed to act as a sedative to the young man’s passion, seemed to purge it of all possessive jealousy.
Canyot himself was steadily advancing in power and originality. He was surprised by the recognition his work received. Not only did he experience no difficulty in selling his pictures, but he found himself accepted as a desirable personage by the whole aesthetic fraternity of that enterprising cosmopolitan city. He turned out to be the only artist in New York whose methods of work were untouched by modern French fashions; this very fact appealed to the American craving for novelty; it was just the moment when a reaction was impending against the more extreme European schools.