After leaving Clementina, Tommy went for a long brisk walk in order to clear his mind, and on his homeward way along the Embankment, branched off to the middle of old Chelsea Bridge in order to admire the moonlight view; he also took off his hat in order to get cool. The treacherous May wind cooled him effectually and sent him to bed for three days with a chill. Clementina sat by his rueful bedside and rated him soundly. The idea of one just recovering from pneumonia setting his blood boiling hot and then cooling himself on a bridge at midnight in the bitter north-east wind! He was about as sane as his uncle. They were a pretty and well-matched pair. Both ought to be placed under restraint. A dark house and a whip would have been their portion in the good old times.
“I’ve got ’em both now,” said Tommy, grinning. “This confounded bedroom is my dark house and your tongue is the whip.”
“I hope it hurts like the devil,” said Clementina.
Tommy wrote from his sick bed a dignified and manly letter to his uncle, and, like Brutus, paused for a reply. None came. Quixtus read it, and his warped vision saw ingratitude and hypocrisy in every line. He had already spoken to Griffiths about the office-stool in the Star Insurance Company. Tommy’s emphatic refusal to sit on it placed him in an awkward position with regard to Griffiths. Openings in a large insurance office are not as common as those for hop-pickers in August. Griffiths, a sour-tempered man at times, would be annoyed. Quixtus, encouraged by Vandermeer, regarded himself as an ill-used uncle, and not only missed all the thrill of his deed of wickedness, but accepted Tommy’s decision as a rebuff to his purely benevolent intentions. He therefore added the unfortunate Tommy to the list of those whom he had tried and found wanting. He had a grievance against Tommy. Such is the topsyturvydom of man after a little thread has snapped in his brain.
Now, it so happened that, on the selfsame day that Tommy crawled again into the open air, Clementina, standing before her easel and painfully painting drapery from the lay figure, suddenly felt the whole studio gyrate in a whirling maelstrom into whose vortex of unconsciousness she was swiftly sucked. She fell in a heap on the floor, and remained there until she came to with a splitting headache and a sensation of carrying masses of bruised pulp at various corners of her body instead of limbs. Her maid, Eliza, finding her lying white and ill on the couch to which she had dragged herself, administered water—there was no such thing as smelling-salts in Clementina’s house—and, on her own responsibility, summoned the nearest doctor. The result of his examination was a diagnosis of overwork. Clementina jeered. Only idlers suffered from overwork. Besides, she was as strong as a horse. The doctor reminded her that she was a woman, with a woman’s delicately adjusted nervous system. She also had her sex’s lack of restraint. A man, finding that he was losing sleep, appetite, control of temper and artistic grip, would abandon work and plunge utterly unashamed into hoggish idleness. A woman always feels that by fighting against weakness she is upholding the honour of her sex, and struggles on insanely till she drops.
“I’m glad you realise I’m a woman,” said Clementina.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the first man who has done so for many years.”
The doctor, a youngish man, very earnest, of the modern neuropathic school, missed the note of irony. This was the first time he had seen Clementina.
“You’re one of the most highly strung women I’ve ever come across,” said he, gravely. “I want you to appreciate the fact and not to strain the tension to breaking-point.”
“You wrap it up very nicely,” said Clementina, “but, to put it brutally, your honest opinion is that I’m just a silly, unreasonable, excitable, sex-ridden fool of a female like a million others. Isn’t that so?”
The young doctor bore the scrutiny of those glittering, ironical points of eyes with commendable professional stolidity.
“It is,” said he, and in saying it he had the young practitioner’s horrible conviction that he had lost an influential new patient. But Clementina stretched out her hand. He took it very gladly.
“I like you,” she said, “because you’re not afraid to talk sense. Now I’ll do whatever you tell me.”
“Go away for a complete change—anywhere will do—and don’t think of work for a month at the very least.”
“All right,” said Clementina.
When Tommy, looking very much the worse for his relapse, came in the next day to report himself in robust health once more, Clementina acquainted him with her own bodily infirmities. It was absurd, she declared, that she should break down, but absurdity was the guiding principle of this comic planet. Holiday was ordained. She had spent a sleepless night thinking how she should make it. Dawn had brought solution of the problem. Why not make it in fantastic fashion, harmonising with the absurd scheme of things?
“What are you going to do?” asked Tommy. “Spend a frolicsome month in Whitechapel, or put on male attire and go for a soldier?”
“I shall hire an automobile and motor about France.”
“It’s sporting enough,” said Tommy, judicially, “but I should hardly call it fantastic.”
“Wait till you’ve heard the rest,” said Clementina. “I had originally intended to take Etta Concannon with me; but since you’ve come here looking like three-ha’porth of misery, I’ve decided to take you.”
“Me?” cried Tommy. “My dear Clementina, that’s absurd.”
“I thought you would agree with me,” said Clementina, “but I’m going to do it. Wouldn’t you like to come?”
“I should think so!” he exclaimed, boyishly. “It would be gorgeous. But——”
“But what?”
“How can I afford to go motoring abroad?”
“You wouldn’t have to afford it. You would be my guest.”
“It’s delightful of you, Clementina, to think of it—but it’s impossible.”
Whereupon an argument arose such as has often arisen between man and woman.
“I’m old enough to be your grandmother, or at least you think so, which comes to the same thing,” said Clementina.
Tommy’s young pride would not allow him to accept largesse from feminine hands, however elderly and unromantic.
“If I had a country house and hosts of servants and several motor-cars and asked you to stay, you’d come without hesitation.”
“That would be different. Don’t you see for yourself?”
Clementina chose not to see for herself. Here was a dolorous baby of a boy disinherited by a lunatic uncle, emaciated by illness and unable to work, refusing a helping hand just because it was a woman’s. It was preposterous. Clementina grew angry. Tommy held firm.
“It’s merely selfish of you. Don’t you see I want a companion?”
Tommy pointed out the companionable qualities of Etta Concannon. But she would not hear of Etta. The sight of Tommy’s wan face had decided her, and she was a woman who was accustomed to carry out her decisions. She was somewhat dictatorial, somewhat hectoring. She had taken it into her head to play fairy godmother to Tommy Burgrave, and she resented his repudiation of her godmotherdom. Besides, there were purely selfish reasons for choosing Tommy rather than Etta, which she acknowledged with inward candour. Tommy was a man who would fetch and carry and keep the chauffeur up to the mark, and inspire gendarmes and custom-house officials and maitres-d’hotel with respect, and, although Clementina feared neither man nor devil, she was aware of the value of a suit of clothes filled with a male entity as a travelling adjunct to a lone woman. With Etta the case would be different. Etta would fetch her motor-veil and carry her gloves with the most adoringly submissive grace in the world; but all the real fetching and carrying for the two of them would have to be done by Clementina herself. Therein lay the difference between Clementina and the type generally known as the emancipated woman. She had no exaggerated notions of the equality of the sexes, which in feminine logic generally means the high superiority of women. Circumstance had emancipated her from dependence upon the other sex, but on the circumstance and the emancipation she cast not too favourable an eye. She had a crystal clear idea of the substantial usefulness of men in this rough and not always ready cosmic scheme. Therefore, for purposes of utility, she wanted Tommy. In her usual blunt manner she told him so.
“You run in here at all hours of the day and night, and it’s Clementina this and Clementina that until I can’t call my soul my own—and now, the first time I ask you to do me a service you fall back on your silly little prejudices and vanity and pride, and say you can’t do it.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Tommy, humbly.
“I tell you what it is,” said Clementina, with a curiously vicious feminine stroke, “you’d come if I was a smart-looking woman with fine clothes who could be a credit to you—but you won’t face going about with an animated rag-and-bone shop like me.”
Tommy flushed as pink as only a fair youth can flush; he sprang forward and seized her wrists and, unwittingly, hurt her in his strong and indignant grip.
“What you’re saying is abominable and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. If I thought anything like that I’d be the most infernal cur that ever trod the earth. I’d lik............