But in spite of her weakness she moved steadily on; and when she came to the great hotels that surrounded the flamboyant gilded statue, the most unsympathetic spot on the face of the globe, she found herself able to cross the pretentious avenue and turn northwards along it without losing her self-control.
Compared with this terrible centre of uptown fashion, how warm and friendly and human and mellow was that unassuming Greenwich Village which she had left!
She had never till this moment realized what the prodding thrust of unmitigated newness, armed with the arrogance of wealth, is able to do to the frail human heart into which it drives its wedge.
She turned eastwards at length, out of the great avenue with its palatial enormities, into a comparatively quiet street that seemed to her to possess something of the massive reticence of London.
It was a quarter to one when Nelly finally arrived at the door of the apartment house where her rival lived.
She was by this time so physically exhausted that a sort of obstinate recklessness took the place of her former agitation.
She rang the bell and asked to see Miss Angel.
‘What name?’ demanded the braided official.
Nelly had one second of hesitation and then she said quietly, ‘Mrs Richard Storm.’
She had a moment of faintness while the man clicked at his telephone board and talked to the apartment overhead; but a few moments’ rest on a polished bench and a drastic effort of her will saved her from collapse.
‘Miss Angel says will you please go straight up,’ announced the man presently. ‘Second floor and first door on the left.’
She entered the elevator, worked by a Negro boy, and emerging at the designated level knocked at the dancer’s door. She was admitted by Thérèse and ushered straight into the luxurious sitting room with its oriental rugs and settees.
The servant closed the door behind her and she found herself alone with the owner of the apartment.
Elise rose from one of the cushioned lounges and advanced towards her with an air of regal indulgence.
‘I’m so glad to make your acquaintance, Mrs Storm,’ she murmured, with the sort of inclination of the head that some barbarian queen might have given to a casual prisoner doomed to die. ‘Please sit down. No! No! This one’s much nicer. There! we’ll sit together here. What a child you are; and oh! how pretty you are! I don’t wonder Richard’s so in love with you.’
She made a half-movement as if she would have touched Nelly’s hand, but something in the face that was turned towards her cut her gesture short.
‘I came to see you,’ Nelly began in a voice that sounded hard and strange, ‘because I wanted you to know exactly what you’re doing, what you’ve done.’
‘My dear child, I’ve done nothing. You’ve come to me on a wild-goose chase. Your husband and I must have been old friends when you were in short frocks. How pretty you must have looked in those days!’
‘I came to see you,’ Nelly repeated, completely disregarding her words, ‘because I wanted you to understand things; and not be able to plead ignorance of the ruin you are causing.’
Elise Angel lifted her eyebrows. ‘What a dramatic little person you are! I don’t myself see this ruin you talk of. You don’t look in the least “ruined”. And as for Richard — why he, even you must admit, looks a great deal better since I first picked him up. It wasn’t your fault I daresay. It was simply want of money. But when I think of how wretchedly thin and miserable he was that day, and how happy he looks now, I can’t say I feel as if “ruin” were the right word for what I have done.’
A look of such strange intensity flickered over Nelly’s face as she opened her lips to reply to this, that the great artist by her side drew in her breath and stared at her in a sort of puzzled wonder. The girl seemed hardly to have heard what the other actually said. It was as if her look answered some unspoken word, some word that passed between them quite independently of any uttered sound. Nelly spoke again:
‘You don’t really love him. I am glad of that. That clears up a great deal. If you really loved him I should feel differently to you. I don’t know whether I should hate you or not, but I should feel differently.’
Elise looked at her with a deeper bewilderment than ever. There was something about Nelly’s self-possession that took the situation out of her hands. As long as it had been a matter of dramatic gesture and physical dominance she had held the lead; but the lead was taken away from her now, the girl of twenty-two seeming to represent an older, deeper experience of life.
‘So you came to me to find out that,’ said Elise Angel.
‘I came to you so that you should know what you’ve done to me. You’ve killed something in me that can never revive. You are a successful woman, Miss Angel; you’re what the world calls a genius. But you are a cruel woman and a heartless one. You are just as much a murderess as if you’d killed me. You have killed me, in a sense. I don’t suppose you care. I know you don’t care. But I wanted you to know once and for all how one person feels about you. I feel towards you as I should feel towards any other perfectly heartless criminal, towards any other person who is capable of killing things. You’ve killed my life, Miss Angel; though no doubt I shall go on living. One does, you know.’ Nelly’s voice had shown no sign of nervous tension as she uttered these words. There were no tears in her eyes. When she had finished she clasped her fingers tightly together and sat very straight, looking in front of her. Her attitude seemed to say, ‘I have spoken for my own satisfaction rather than for any desire to make you understand me. And now I may just as well sit here and think, as sit anywhere else.’
‘I suppose it’s never occurred to you,’ said Elise Angel, ‘that I was a friend of Richard years and years before you came on the scene. One has to judge things by their general effects. And I can’t say his life with you seems to have made him so very happy. He left me full of radiant spirits to go to England; and I find him here thin, miserable, half-starved, working in a wretched office! Of course I know he has to support you; but it seems to me when a man gives his name to a woman he deserves at least to be looked after a bit.’
Very slowly Nelly unclasped her tightly locked fingers, and turned her head towards her rival. The thought flashed through her mind, He has been telling her about Robert, and for the first time during this interview there was aroused in her a ferment of real vindictiveness. Out of the depths of her being this evil poison rose to the surface, corroding her more honourable indignation and turning it into bitter gall. It rose to the surface from that deep cistern of malice which is one of the unfathomable secrets of mortality.
As usually happens in these cases the cause of this particular anger was a misunderstanding. It was unfair. It was unjust. For Richard had far too much pride to breathe a word to Elise on such a matter as Canyot’s relations with his wife — those picnic lunches in the painter’s studio were quite unknown to the dancer.