‘What?’ cried Canyot in a loud voice. ‘It’s impossible! She wouldn’t contemplate such a thing.’
It’s hard to predict what a person like Elise will do, ‘said Ivan quietly.’ But you may be quite right. It would be a sacrifice in some ways.’
Catharine, who had fallen into a sort of meditative trance with her chin propped upon her knees, now struggled to her feet. She bent down and taking Nelly by the wrists tried to pull her up from the couch. ‘I’ve got something very amusing to tell you my dear and I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to say it out before these two.’
Nelly, rather reluctantly, submitted to her violence and allowed herself to be led into the passage. ‘Don’t let Ivan run away,’ shouted Catharine to the painter before she closed the door.
‘I always say,’ remarked Karmakoff, sinking down on the couch vacated by Nelly and lighting a cigarette, ‘that it’s you honest conservatives who do more to retard the progress of the world than any other people.’
‘I don’t believe in the progress of the world,’ replied Canyot drily. ‘Life swings backwards and forwards. Everything has a beginning and an end. It’s all the same old mad game.’
‘Then why,’ murmured the Russian, puffing out a cloud of smoke and arranging himself on the couch with a certain feline grace, ‘why do we fuss ourselves about anything?’
‘I don’t fuss, myself,’ growled the painter stepping back to regard his canvas, upon which was emerging a revel of satyrs and nymphs; ‘it’s just a matter of taste. My taste objects to cruelty and disorder and lechery. I am old-fashioned, that is all. It doesn’t really matter. But I’m not comfortable when I’ve behaved like a cad.’
Karmakoff smiled pleasantly. ‘I suppose you’re thinking at this moment that I’ve behaved like a cad to Catharine?’
Canyot moved up to his canvas and gave it a resolute splash with his brush. His gesture was so drastic that it looked as if he would have greatly enjoyed dabbing that brush across Ivan’s smiling countenance.
‘Heaven forbid,’ he said, ‘that I should interfere between you two. I expect you are perfectly agreed as to what the limits of life are.’
‘What do you mean by the limits of life?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ murmured the painter indifferently, ‘something about life extending a little further than the five senses, I suppose. You mustn’t press me. I’m at work.’
At that moment the passage door opened with a violent outward fling and Catharine burst in upon them. ‘She’s upset. I’ve upset her dreadfully. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know she cared.’
Canyot dropped his brush upon the floor and came forward, his face convulsed with anger. He flung Catharine aside as if she were some intrusive stranger, and rushed to the back of the passage where there was a small box-room filled with spoiled canvases. Here he found Nelly seated in a dark corner shaken with smothered sobs.
‘Darling! my darling!’ he whispered, kneeling beside her and putting his arm around her. ‘Tell me what’s the matter. No! no! never mind! I don’t want to hear anything. Nelly, my darling — I can’t bear to see you like this.’
The girl gently but obstinately pushed him away. ‘Leave me alone, please, Robert,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be better soon. I’m silly to make such a fuss. It’s nothing really. Please go back to them, Robert, if you don’t mind? I’ll be all right in a minute.’
He obeyed her so far as to move to the further end of the passage. But he would not open the studio door. She made a desperate effort to control herself and rising to her feet passed her hands over her hair and pressed her knuckles into her eyes and against her cheeks.
‘Robert,’ she murmured in a whisper. He came quickly up to her side. ‘Get my things for me, please, my dear, will you? I don’t want to see them like this. I’ll go straight home I think. And don’t let Catharine talk to Karmakoff about me. But she’s sure to do it. She’s sure to do it!’ And her sobs began to break out afresh. Canyot ached to press her to his heart and soothe her tears with kisses from his very soul, but he kept a rigid hold over himself.
‘She shan’t say a word, my dearest one — not a word. But won’t you let me take you home, Nelly? I’ll just say you’re unwell and we’ll go straight off.’
She looked at him quickly, a rapid tender look, full of affectionate gratitude. ‘No — no, Robert, I don’t wish that. It’s sweet of you, old friend, but I don’t wish it. Get my things, please, dear. I shall be quite all right.’
He saw that her mind was made up and he went straight into the studio and possessed himself of her hat and cloak. Catharine was huddled on the couch, clinging like a great frightened child to Karmakoff. ‘How is she?’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry I told her! I’d no idea she’d take it like that.’
‘She is going home alone,’ said Canyot, turning away with her things on his arm. ‘We must let her do exactly what she wishes. I’ll come back when I’ve seen her into the subway.’
‘She knows how to change at Grand Central?’ asked Karmakoff quietly.
‘The shuttle to Times Square, you mean?’ said Canyot. ‘Yes, I’ll tell her. If by any chance I don’t come back you’ll make yourselves comfortable here won’t you? You know where my tea is Catharine?’ And once more the door was shut between the studio and the passage.
Nelly did not let Canyot go a step further with her than the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway. She made him leave her at the top of the steps.
‘Sorry for having made such an idiot of myself, Robert,’ she said as she gave him her hand. ‘I knew Richard was having an affair with someone. It was only a shock to me to hear Catharine talk about him — you know? — in the way she does. I’ll be all right now, my dear. Goodbye — God bless you, Robert.’
He turned sadly up the street, and feeling himself singularly disinclined to go back to his studio he made his way into the park and walked blindly, engrossed in miserable thoughts, across its least frequented spaces.
Nelly got out at the Grand Central and made her way through the conflicting streams of people to the little shuttle train for Times Square. She had to stand, during this short journey, clinging to a leather strap, and the mass of indifferent humanity that were jammed against her weighed down her spirit with an infinite discouragement.
It was even worse when she emerged at Times Square. Well, she thought, has this place been named! In those underground corridors extending indefinitely in every direction, with their little green and black arrows pointing backwards and forwards, and their confluent streams of people, it certainly did seem as though she had arrived at the spot in the universe where time and motion became identical.
As she struggled against the crowd, she experienced the queer feeling that her real conscious mind was somewhere out of all this, and that the Nelly thus pushed and jostled was a mere helpless automaton among other automatons. A horrible feeling of mechanical indifference seized her. Her real mind seemed to have escaped out of her flesh, leaving nothing but a mass of quivering exposed nerves that could suffer passively without end but could take no initiative. She found herself thinking with relief of the quietness of her father’s body lying in Littlegate churchyard, ‘free among the dead’.
Confused by the bewildering corridors and stairways she got finally swept by the crowd into an uptown train on the Seventh Avenue subway instead of a downtown one.
Her first intimation of this mistake came to her when the train was just leaving the next station marked Fiftieth Street. She got up from her seat and looked around her in dismay. Her eyes had such panic in them that one man whispered to another; a little old coloured woman who had been sitting next her hazarded the remark, ‘Wrong station, honey?’