Maud spent a month with Lady Ramsden—four epoch-making weeks. The note of change which had been struck in her when she met Violet had expanded into a harmonious chord. Just as healthy physical surroundings produce physical health, so intimacy with healthy-minded people produces a corresponding well-being in the soul. And thus recuperated, she was able to make the effort she had been unable to make before, and when she returned to London at the end of July she congratulated herself on the change that she alone knew of, as much as her friends congratulated her on the change they could all see.

Parliament was not to rise before the 10th of August, and the Chathams were to remain in London till then. During that fortnight Maud saw Tom constantly, often going to see him and May in Bloomsbury, and Tom, with or without May, more than once coming to see her.

The old camaraderie days of Athens seemed to be renewing themselves. Tom found Maud stimulating in a way that May could not be, partly because he loved his wife, partly although he loved her. With May his responsibility asserted itself; he was always aware of an increasing anxiety as to what would happen to them all, crouching in his mind, ready to spring.{315} And he knew—he could not help knowing—that May did not really understand how essential his art was to him, how inexorable was his inner need of producing the best he could; how bad, how immoral, the statuette of the boy with the rifle seemed to him. She had not an artistic nature, and she had never, except in him, known a man who served that most exacting of all mistresses, whose service is a passion to her slaves. For Manvers, as he often said himself, was not like those poets who sing because they must, but those who sing because they choose to sing. He was clever, diabolically clever, and he liked to exercise his intelligence.

With Maud then Tom could both throw off, or at least not be scourged by, his responsibilities, and also he knew that she understood how terrible the struggle he might have to go through would be. There was always the possibility ahead that no one would want to possess any of the shining gods and goddesses, and if so it was financially impossible for him to go on producing them.

The three were sitting on the balcony where Manvers and Maud had sat alone one night only a month or two ago, and, as usual in her presence, Tom’s Promethean eagle had ceased pecking at him for the time, and had hopped away out of sight.

May was feeling a little out of it, and a little neglected, for Tom was talking to Maud in a way he did not talk to her. He was never anything but kind and considerate to her; but the hurried luncheons which they ate together in their grilling little flat, were often rather silent affairs. If the morning’s work had been satisfactory, Tom was only eager to{316} finish and get to work again; if he had got on badly, the Promethean eagle always seemed aware of it, and applied its claws and beak to the tenderest places with the accuracy of experience. But with Maud he was altogether different, partly, no doubt, for reasons stated above, and partly also because the most well-mannered and loving husbands do not trouble themselves to talk, if they are not inclined to talk, in the privacy of the domestic luncheon-table. Thirdly, as May knew herself, she was not, as Maud expressed it, a “dialogist,” and it was of dialogists she and Tom were talking now. Incidentally, they were both behaving like dialogists.

“I think,” Maud was saying, “that I’m about the best sort of dialogist. Not only can I talk quite intelligently and agreeably—can’t I, May?—but I’m a first-rate listener.”

“Good listening is not necessary for a dialogist,” said Tom. “Dialogists enjoy themselves most when they both talk together, as we used to do at Athens.”

“Oh, you’re wrong,” said Maud. “Each dialogist must know that the other is sympathique, and the easiest way of conveying that is by listening well.”

“Yes; but I know you are sympathique to me,” said Tom, “so I don’t care whether you listen or not. Besides, listening is rather a despicable quality. I don’t think you’ve got it, you know, so I’m not being rude.”

May got up.

“Well, we must go,” she said. “I said I’d be back by three to take Mr. Thomas out.”

“Oh, don’t go yet,” said Maud. “Why, you’ve only just finished lunch!{317}”

“I must; but Tom can stop here.”

May was conscious that it required a little magnanimity to say this, and at the same time that she threw a pinch of bitterness into her magnanimity. She wished Maud to know that she knew that it was Tom, not herself, Maud wanted to talk to; and though she had not spoken with any idea of her words conveying this, she was not sorry that they might bear such an interpretation.

But Tom did not dive into such feminine subtleties, though Maud suspected them.

“I shall stop a bit if I’m not in the way,” he said. “I meant to take a holiday this afternoon, and I shall take it here.”

Maud stood drumming with her fingers on the balustrade for a moment or two after May had gone. This was the first time she had been alone with Tom since her stay in Norfolk, and she revelled in her sense of security, for she felt all the old camaraderie feeling, and no touch of any more disturbing results from the companionship, and it was with the air and the words of a comrade that she spoke.

“I think you ought to have gone with May,” she said. “I can say that to you, for you know how glad I am personally that you stayed.”

Tom looked up.

“Why?”

“Because she wanted you to go. I am sure of that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But I do,” said Maud. “Don’t be banal, and say you ought to know because you are her husband. That’s no argument. You are a man, and it is impossible for you to understand a woman as a woman can.{318}”

“But it’s unreasonable.”

“That, again, is no argument. Oh, good heavens, Tom, if we were all reasonable, what a simple world it would be! And how dull!”

“I’m not sure I don’t prefer dulness to excitement,” said Tom. “Wait till you’ve had a fright, and then see how you appreciate uneventfulness.”

“Ah, but dulness is not a synonym for content,” said Maud, speaking from her new experiences. “It is a great mistake to suppose that.”

Tom flicked off the end of his cigarette ash. For the last few weeks he had deliberately stifled certain thoughts, but with Maud there was no need to stifle them.

“I am not sure,” he said. “Of course one aims at content—one aims at nothing else. But one aims at it, I think, because one knows it is unattainable. There is no such thing as content for people who are alive—you know what I mean by alive. I think we have talked about it before. For human beings to be content is to be limited.”

“Yes, and to be human is to be limited. I am talking like a maiden aunt, I know.”

Tom looked up smiling.

“You have the distinction of having invented the least applicable definition possible of yourself. What’s the opposite to maiden aunt? Married niece, I suppose. There is your label.”

“But I am not married.”

“No; but you unite qualities which are rarely united. You are experienced and you are fresh. How do you do it?”

“I might much more reasonably ask you that.{319}”

“Not at all. At present I feel like a blasé baby.”

“You?”

Tom suddenly became overwhelmingly conscious of all he had stifled so long. His anxieties over petty money matters, the sordidness of the life in the little flat in Bloomsbury—all these were trifles; but there were other things which were not trifles. He and May loved each other—that he believed; but apart from their love to each other their passions lay as far sundered as the two poles. Each was invisible and incomprehensible to the other.

“It is this,” he said. “I have felt and feel a passion for something which I shall, I am afraid, have to abandon. I am telling you things I have told to no one, hardly to myself. But, as you know, art is a passion to me. There is one art, so I think, and I am trying to realize it. But I have to face the probability that it will not be appreciated—already I call it a probability—and if so, I shall have to abandon it because I have other ties, and the need for bread and butter rightly outweighs all else. Not that I am less enthusiastic; but one can neither live nor triumph by enthusiasm. There are claims which outweigh all enthusiasms or artistic convictions.”

“Oh, but the two could not actually come in conflict,” said Maud. “It is absurd to suppose that you will have to abandon your ideas of art at the very outset because they are not marketable. Besides, most purchasers are Philistines.”

“That is exactly what I fear,” said Tom. “Of course I don’t say for a moment that I can produce good things, but I have an idea of beauty, and I must{320} work for that as long as I can. Perhaps great encouragement from any one would mend my case, but the world regards me with disconcerting indifference. Manvers thinks me a delver after uninteresting survivals. He may be right, but again I may be. That the majority of purchasers think Manvers right is of course indisputable.”

“But all this need not make you blasé,” said Maud.

Tom was silent. What he hungered for was active, sincere sympathy from May, but that was not to be had. She seemed to regard the possible abandonment of his practice of art as she would regard any other change of employment, as if, for instance, Tom was a butcher and found it necessary to become a baker. He had, as he acknowledged to himself, taken an impossible view of all she might be to him. He was in love with her still, as much as, or even more than when they married, but he had realized that she did not and could not sympathize fully with his aims. At first it had seemed as if there was nothing she could not do for him, as if they two were wholly and inevitably one. But, without loving her the less, he had learned that it was not so. She had one passion, he another, and they had to support their passions singly. But the most rudimentary code of loyalty forbade his saying anything of the kind to Maud.

“No; you are right,” he said. “I have a great many illusions left, and one can’t be blasé if one has illusions. Of course I still have the illusion that the Demeter is going to be a masterpiece. But the necessity of wondering whether the masterpiece is marketable clouds the illusion a little.”

“Oh, you are certainly not blasé,” said Maud, with{321} conviction. “How can a man married to a woman he loves, working at what he loves, not only for its sake but to supply her actual needs, be blasé. You ought to keep young for ever.”

“I am a quarter of a century old,” said Tom, “and I should like to live till a hundred. It’s a good thing to be alive. Do you know that line of Whitman’s?—I can’t quote it exactly—‘Let us take hands and help each other to-day, because we are alive together.’”

Maud’s eye kindled.

“I like great big common ideas like that,” she said. “Mr. Manvers would think it was a sign of approaching bourgeoisie or old age. After all we are alive, and who is to help us except—except each other?” she added, with a fine superiority to grammar, and holding out her hand to Tom.

Tom smiled, and the dimples came. Just now it struck Maud that he was so like his cousin, instead of the other way about.

“I believe you understand me,” he said. “And to understand any one is the greatest benefit you can do him!”

Lady Chatham returned before long from an unnecessary call, undertaken chiefly because the carriage had to go that way, and it was the most convenient thing in the world. She urged Tom to stop for tea, and it was consequently nearly six when he left the house.

His way lay across the park from the Albert Gate to the Marble Arch, and he loitered, for Maud had replenished his serenity, and when we are serene we are not in a hurry. It was a hot afternoon, and by the time he got to the Serpentine the banks were crowded{322} with bathers. The grass underneath the big elm trees on the side of the Row was covered with heaps of clothes, and multitudes of boys and young men were standing about on the bank, or swimming. The soft persuasive colour of an English evening was there, and the warm languor of the south, and Tom stood watching them for some time, feeling rather as if a gallery of antique statues had come to life. Some of the bathers were very well made, one particularly, a boy of about eighteen, who was standing on the bank resting on his foremost foot, the other just touching the ground with the toes, his hands clasped behind his head. He was long in the leg, short and slight in the body, and his hair curled crisply on his forehead as in a Greek bronze. Tom told himself that he was Lysippian, and went on his way thinking what a fine subject for a statue Isaac would make—Isaac waiting with the faggots of wood on his shoulder, standing gracefully, unthinkingly, like the boy he had just seen, not knowing who the victim should be.

May meanwhile had taken Mr. Thomas out for his airing, had had tea alone, and was feeling a little ill-used. Maud had been quite right. Tom, she thought, ought to have come away with her. Why? Well, for no reason except the very important one that he wanted to stop. Then it occurred to her that a candid enemy might say she was in danger of becoming jealous of Maud, and the thought of that made her quite angry. But no one had suggested it except herself.

In Tom’s mind the vision of Isaac was supplanted by other thoughts. He wondered whether he had{323} said too much, whether by any chance Maud could guess his trouble, for he knew she was skilful at reading between the lines, and on his way down Oxford Street he determined to write her a line in order to counteract any such undesirable possibility.

May was not in the drawing-room when he got in, and taking up a postcard—for there was nothing private in what he meant to say—he wrote: “I am not blasé at all. Don’t think I am.”

He directed it, and leaving it with two or three others for the post, went to see if May was in yet. He found her with Mr. Thomas, who was a little fractious, and who, on Tom’s entrance, began yelling in a way that shouted volumes for his lungs and larynx. Tom bore it for a minute or two, but as it did not subside he shouted out to May across the tumult—

“I’ve only just come in, and if I stop here I shall be deafened. I shall be in the studio till dinner.”

Mr. Thomas condescended to go to sleep after a quarter of an hour or so, and May went to the drawing-room. Tom’s post-card was lying address downwards, and not thinking what she was doing she read it. It was quite natural and innocent to see to whom he was writing, but when she saw the address she felt a little more ill-used than before.

About a week after this, Maud Wrexham came to see them in Bloomsbury. May was out, and Tom was in despair because the breezy model had taken it into her head to demand a higher wage for standing, and Tom could not afford either to pay her more, or to part with her. He had engaged her till the end of the week at the higher rate, but he knew he could not continue to do so indefinitely. He was walking{324} up and down the studio when Maud was sloppily announced by the slip-shod maid—wondering what on earth was to be done.

“May not here,” she said, “and you be-thunder-clouded! What’s the matter?”

Tom related the woes of the afternoon, and commented bitterly on the rapacity of the human race.

“I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “I can’t possibly keep her on at this rate. It’s hard enough as it is.”

Maud flushed suddenly, and seemed to have something to say.

“We are old friends,” she began at length, “and I don’t think you will be offended at what I am going to say. Will you do me a favour? Will you let me lend you some money?”

Tom stopped suddenly in his walk.

“How could I be offended?” he asked. “It is awfully kind of you. For myself I should say ‘Yes’ at once. Why not? But there is May.”

Maud was silent a moment. A vague impatience came over her, for she had understood rather more than Tom had meant her to understand a week ago.

“Why should she know?” she asked at length. “It is a matter between you and me. I know some people would refuse such a thing at once. It is such a comfort that you are sensible. I have too much money, you have too little. There can be no reason why I should not lend you some.”

Despite herself she felt a great anxiety that Tom should acquiesce. The thing was of no importance, but she could not help longing that Tom should take{325} her offer, and not let May know. The feeling in her mind was too undefined to lend itself to analysis, but she was conscious of desiring this in some subtle manner beyond her control.

But Tom answered her at once.

“No, I must tell May. It would be out of the question not to tell her. You see that surely. But I thank you again for your offer. I will tell her to-night. Perhaps she will not object; on the other hand, I am afraid she may. I have no such feelings about it. Of course we can go on for a month or so, but what is to happen then? If I could get Demeter finished, and the clay sketch of the other done, I shall have done my best, and if no one buys them——”

Maud looked up inquiringly.

“God knows what next,” said Tom. “If May and the baby keep well I can’t bring myself to feel desperate. But if anything demanding expense happens to either of them I don’t know what we shall do.”

“You’re fussed and worried this afternoon,” said Maud, sympathetically. “It’s this bother about the model, and the heat, and so on. This room is awfully hot. Why don’t you have a new blind up?”

Tom laughed rather bitterly.

“New blinds!” he said. “I’m thankful we’ve got some old ones. Thank God May doesn’t know about it all, how near we are to actual want! But I lie awake at night wondering if I ought to tell her. I am worried, I confess it; and I thought I was so sure of myself. I aim at what I believe to be best. I would sooner have produced that”—and he pointed{326} to the Demeter—“than all Manvers’ things, for which he gets what he asks. It will be finished next week, and two or three dealers are coming here to look at it. They bought those miserable statuettes of mine readily enough.”

“Of course you can’t make any more of those,” said Maud. “I understand that.”

Tom flushed with pleasure.

“I believe you do,” he said, “though I don’t think any one else does. Manvers and Wallingthorpe think it is half out of sheer perversity that I make what they call heathen goddesses. But they are wrong. I do it because I must. I may be quite wrong about myself, but I believe I am an artist. If I didn’t think that I should have taken to the statuettes again the moment we lost all our money. They might as well tell me to make plush brackets—which I could probably do tolerably well. If I am not an artist, of course I am wasting my time when I might be earning money, but I can’t sterilize that possibility just yet. When you have a passion for a thing, it is not easy to give it all up because you have no bank-notes.”

“It’s hard,” said Maud.

“I cannot serve two masters,” continued Tom, earnestly. “I cannot use the gifts I believe I may possess in any other way than the way I believe to be best. If the worst comes to the worst, if I cannot get my living by—oh, it’s impossible, impossible!” he cried.

Before Maud had time to reply the door opened, and May came in. She, too, saw by Tom’s face that something had happened.{327}

“Why, what’s the matter, Tom?” she asked quickly.

“Nothing, dear,” said he, getting up and recovering himself with an effort. “I have had a row with a model, and she says she won’t sit for me any more at the present terms; and so we parted. May, give us some tea, dear, will you? I want tea badly, and so does Miss Wrexham.”

May looked a little vexed; she felt she had not been told all. She shook hands with Maud, and remarked, a little curtly, that she did not know the Chathams were still in London.

“Only a few days more,” said Maud. “How splendidly the Demeter has got on.”

May was a little mollified.

“Yes, Tom’s been working very hard—too hard, I think. He doesn’t take enough exercise.”

“Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that when she’s finished,” said Tom; “and it’s exercise enough chipping away at that stone.”

“I saw Mr. Holders this afternoon,” said May. “Mr. Holders bought one of Tom’s things last winter,” she explained to Maud, “and he wants to know if you have anything else for him. I said there was one unfinished statuette, but I couldn’t get you to finish it. Besides, you’d given it me.”

Tom grinned and stirred his tea.

“No, dear, I should just think you couldn’t get me to finish it,” he said. “May means that little abortion on the chimney-piece in the sitting-room, you know. There’s a horror for you!”

Maud Wrexham soon went away, and the two were left together. May’s thoughts went back to the{328} trouble she had seen on Tom’s face when she entered, and presently she said—

“Tom, what was the matter when I came in?”

“We had been talking about what I told you,” he said. “I can’t possibly afford to give more than I do for models, and I am rather in a hole.”

“Poor old boy!” said she. “But what can we do? You must have a model, you say, and you have to pay her.”

“Unfortunately I have very little to pay her with. We must make the little we have last as long as possible.”

“What did Maud Wrexham say?”

“She offered to lend me some.”

May got up from where she had been sitting next to him with her cheeks blazing. The idea of borrowing at all had been distasteful to her, and the idea that Maud should have offered it was intolerable.

“She offered to lend you money—you? And you—what did you say to her?”

“May dear, don’t behave like that. I said, of course, that I must ask you.”

May was all on fire with indignation. The offer appeared to her an insult, and she smarted under it as a horse under a lash. She felt that her vague disquietude for the last week or so was explained and justified. What business had Tom to be on such terms with another? Her anger included Tom too. He had not rejected it with surprise and scorn.

“You said you would consult me?” she asked. “And what answer did you suppose I should give you? Did you think I should say, ‘Take it’? Tom, you know me very little.{329}”

“May, do be reasonable,” said Tom. “Perhaps I ought to have told you sooner, but the state is this: if no one offers to buy the Demeter, we have to face the fact that in a limited time we shall have no money left. What am I to do?”

But May hardly seemed to hear what he said.

“You accepted her offer provisionally!” she exclaimed. “Tom, how could you do it? And you said you would consult me? you told her that? And she knows that you and I are talking the matter over, discussing whether we should be her pensioners!”

Tom grew impatient.

“My dear, you really are talking nonsense,” he said; “there is no question of being anybody’s pensioners. It is to a certain extent always a matter of time before one is recognized. If I can manage to work on at the things I think worth doing, good. If not, what is to happen to us? Maud Wrexham is an old and great friend of mine. But you are unreasonable. Do not be unreasonable. It is not like you. You have given me your answer, and of course I accept your decision. Don’t let us discuss it any more. It is no manner of use.”

He walked to the door and paused, looking at her. But she made no sign, and he left the room.

Tom stood still for a moment on the narrow landing outside the room. A patch of ruddy sunlight came through the window which lit the stairs and struck on the narrow strip of oilcloth which did duty for a carpet. The window was bordered with hideous orange-coloured glass, and a ray through it fell on Tom’s foot as he stood there, and the orange on the{330} blacking made an abhorrent tone. He felt beaten and dispirited, and the whole place suddenly seemed intolerably sordid. The narrow strip of oilcloth was continued along the landing, and was bordered on each side by a foot or two of imperfectly stained board. The banisters were of that particularly flimsy build which is characteristic of cheap lodgings. There were two bad prints on the walls, one of King Alfred and the cakes, the other of the Duke of Wellington with an impressionist background of the battle of Waterloo. To Tom in his present mood the whole scene seemed to him to be a sort of spectre reflected on to space from his own mind. Everything was unlovely and impossible.

He felt sore and angry with May. She did not understand what his art was to him. She did not understand Maud Wrexham’s offer. She did not understand him. More than once the impulse came on him to go back into the room and try to explain, but it seemed useless. She was angry and indignant, and anger is a bandage over our eyes. And he knew, and was honest enough to confess, that he was angry too, disappointed chiefly, but also angry. Maud’s offer had come to him like manna. For himself he would as soon have thought of not drinking of a spring that suddenly welled up in a desert when he was dying of thirst, as of not accepting it. But May could not understand that. She felt it as an insult to him and to herself, and to disregard May’s feelings was impossible.

He took his hat and went downstairs. It was a broiling August afternoon, and the world seemed dying of heat-apoplexy. The streets were breathless{331} and baked, and the sky was brass. At the corner of the street a watercart had just passed, and Tom stood still a moment inhaling a whiff of air which had a certain freshness in it. It reminded him of the smell of a morning in the country, after a rainy night. He knew that he ought to go back and work, but it was not to be done. His heart was heavy and his eye was dull. Well, there was the British Museum only a hundred yards off, and a man must be in a very bad state, he reflected, if the Elgin marbles have nothing to say to him. The place was nearly empty, and he sat down in front of the eternal figures from the Parthenon pediments with a little sigh of relief.

He had made up accounts that morning with infinite difficulty, for it was an operation to which he was not accustomed. The rapidity with which twos and threes added up into tens and twenties seemed to him simply amazing. And really it was absurd that there should only be twenty shillings in a pound. There ought to have been at least twenty-five or thirty. And the net result had been that at their present rate of living they could go on for three weeks more, still leaving the bill for the piece of Carrara unpaid. He had fac............