Renaissance : a novel

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Calvar’s Importunity 1

II. The Daughter of Willowdene - - 10

CHAPTER I C alvar's Importunity

With a short, sharp expletive, and an impatient thrust against the edge of his laboratory desk, John Calvar rose from his padded chair and bent a vexed gaze upon the subject of his study.

“Damn the thing !” he said.

Before him lay a wide sheet of white paper, across which an orderly procession of letters and numerals marched with the scientific precision of a mathematical equation. Calvar glared at each section of the hieroglyphic.

“Damn the thing !” he said again.

Turning, he frowned into the congested depths of the large room. His gaze ranged aimlessly in an inattentive survey of the ranks of tables topped by a glim¬ mering array of complicated apparatus and came to a focus only when arrested by the stare of two peculiarly lighted eyes which, peering from the dusky face of his Hindu assistant, challenged him from across the top of a retort stand. Calvar broke the contact by a quick turn and strode towards a tier of glass shelves which lined one side of the room. Dhu Singh, the young Sikh, had come to him many months before when he had advertised for a student willing to assist him in his experimentation, for little more than a love of the work and a share in its adventures. Calvar had never become quite accustomed to the Hindu’s presence. He was irked a little by it now.

He looked back towards his desk and his eyes lighted with a new decision as he snapped a sharp glance at the wide sheet on the desk top. Reaching to the lower tier of glass shelves, he seized a Florence flask of greenish liquid. For an instant he balanced it in the light before the scrutiny of his keen black eyes. Then, with sudden impatience, he flung the flask from him and, as though the two movements were one, wheeled towards his assistant, while the flask crashed against the wall.

Dhu Singh stood perfectly poised. He was not per¬ turbed. He knew that his master’s impatience was but the herald of progress. His olive features betrayed only a habitual casualness of interest and a certain Oriental mirthfulness that could derive pleasure from another’s predicament. His interest held to its casual quality as he watched the slow spread of the emerald blotch on the wall-plaster and viewed the crystal wreckage beneath it.

Calvar fixed the Hindu with his gaze. He seemed to have selected him to bear the brunt of his wrath. He opened his mouth to speak, then, as if realizing how little the fault was his servant’s, he turned away with a jerk of the head that set his black hair in confusion, and walked into aq adjoining room.

With an easy grace and quiet step the Hindu followed as far as the doorway. He had always shown an unusual kind of interest in his master’s moods. His mute

CAEVAR’S IMPORTUNITY solicitude at such times was so constant that Calvar himself had come to expect it, and even now he was turned as if waiting curiously for the olive face to appear in the doorway.

A thin film of new knowledge lay lightly on Calvar’s consciousness as his eyes met the Oriental’s. He could not capture the full meaning of the thought which seemed to flicker between them. It was like a gossamer thread bridging the gap between Orient and Occident. There had grown a subtle understanding. His servant smiled, and Calvar, conquering his ill-temper, flushed slightly to the warmth of the Oriental’s spirit of tenderness.

Calvar turned again and crossed an upstairs hallway to his living apartments. He stood in the centre of the front room, staring absent-mindedly through the window. He was thinking of the same thing now that had occupied his thoughts all morning, insisting upon attention, rendering concentration impossible and hindering his scientific work.

He glanced at his watch. It was just noon. He could not remember when the time had been so slow in passing. With impatience he contemplated the next three hours. At three o’clock would come the consummation of a desire which had driven him from the orderly routine of his day’s work. At three o’clock !

He was unusually critical as to the room’s appoint¬ ments. Earlier in the day he had piqued the curiosity of his janitress by ordering a change .of the window draperies, the inclusion of a bowl of roses, afld a few turns to the setting of the appointments which would soften the usual severity of the place. He saw that the janitress had carried out his instructions faithfully. The changes satisfied him with their effectiveness. The new draperies lent an alluring atmosphere of softness and intime, suffusing the room with lilac radiance. The scent of generous blooms flowed out from the huge bowl and filled the air with a provoking perfume. The leopard skin which had been brought from his bed¬ chamber was spread invitingly upon the large couch.

Hilda Murray had never before consented to come to his apartment. They had been wont to meet in the indignity of public parks — equally distasteful to both — or to talk over tea-cups in the spurious privacy of west-end lounges. The pleasure of their companionship had been continually disturbed by her uneasiness lest someone should see them. He had frequently suggested his own apartment and she had refused. At last, however, yielding to his importunity, she had consented.

He looked at his watch again and his mind sped forward to the meeting. There was a new spring to his tread as he walked about the room, as if he stepped in rhythm to music welling within him. He paused at the couch and his hand fondled the soft, fine fur of the leopard skin. For a few moments he stood thus and, with softened gaze, looked at the light which filtered through the lilac draperies. “You are coming, Hilda. You are coming here - to me,” he murmured.

Calvar came back to the immediate moment with a realization of normal needs. Before meeting Hilda' Murray at the appointed place from which he was to bring her to his rooms, he must take a lonely lunch and attend to some trivialities of routine. With the strength

CALVAR’S IMPORTUNITY of long practice he set aside thoughts of Hilda and assumed the usual set and slightly stern air of John Calvar, M.D. As he emerged from the apartment house, intent upon reaching his favourite restaurant, a woman crossed the street in his direction. He made a brief pause as he recognized her. It was Mary Durand.

She did not notice Calvar and walked on, disappearing through the door from which he had just come. The sight of Mary Durand entering the house which contained his own apartment brought a sudden curiosity, until he remembered that relatives of hers had recently moved into the apartments above his own. He had not seen her since a well-remembered afternoon, weeks ago, when an accidental meeting had held them in conversation a few moments ; it had been characteristic of all their meetings, Calvar valuing the moments more than life, Mary giving no sign that she was even conscious of the subdued tumult in his breast. And now, as he caught again the chaste beauty of her face, he reflected upon many things, especially upon life that held one prize impossible to secure, and one joy that would remain always a thing of dreams. Seeing her just now, even though she did not see him, was like a blessing. It brought back a certain hidden tenderness he had striven long since to bury ; and it brought the choke which strong men feel toward love lying deep, unconfessed.

He could not think of Hilda Murray in the same moment with this woman. His mind had been centred on Hilda when Mary crossed the street toward him, and he felt the jolt to his being. . . . Life and ambition had been leading him on bare highways ; blind pleasure in personal advancement had been urging him roughshod over memories that flashed to him again, even in the brief moment of Mary Durand’s passing. Hilda Murray was a part of the blinder days. He walked on toward his restaurant. He was not thinking of Hilda.

Calvar knew that he had no claims upon the daughter of Professor Durand. During college days the erudite and aloof old man had made a friend of his pupil, John Calvar, and the latter never forgot the personal encouragement he received or the pleasant evenings at the professor’s modest home in Kensington. Even yet the professor kept in touch, always showing pleasure at Calvar’s scientific advancements. Yet his interest was solely that of a Professor toward his favourite pupil, and he would have been unfriendly at any suspicion of Calvar’s regard for Mary. . . . Now that his wife was dead, he claimed his daughter’s devotion with almost a jealous insistence, as the one stay of his declining years.

So it had come to be that Calvar heard only indirectly of the woman who used to charm the evenings at the Professor’s home. He would hear of her through friends who knew Durand.

“She is the most beautiful woman in London,” a certain physician had told him. “Something unattainable about her, though.”

And Calvar knew that the unattainable something had less to do with family ties than with an inseparable element of her beauty and personal charm.

His mood lasted for a few moments, until, as always with Mary’s memory, he found it easier for himself to put it from him. . . . “Every man,” he thought, “has an

CALVAR’S IMPORTUNITY undercurrent that it is best not to explore.” There was the common day to engross him, and he walked on forgetting.

In his gait was the suggestion of sure poise. His sallow countenance with its aquiline nose and determined mouth told of unusual nervous energy. His black hair and brows and the black eyes beneath them lent an emphasis of pallor to his skin and a suggestion of asceticism to his presence.

Strangers on the street often bestowed more than casual attention upon this young man of thirty years, wondering, as they passed, why he had attracted their notice. Members of the medical profession, who knew him as the discoverer of a famous method of treating septic wounds, regarded him with mingled admiration and jealousy, wondering what secret of energy had raised so young a man to the sure regard of the body of his confreres and to a position of financial ease.

Calvar worshipped Fame with so jealous a devotion that his every act was dynamic toward that end. He had developed a genius for turning everything to his own use. The war had meant for him not only a patriotic service but an opportunity to rise ; and it is uncertain whether his satisfaction in discovering the new method of draining wounds was inspired so much by the thousands of human lives it saved, as by the elevation he personally gained from it.

He had forgotten the things that turned in his brain, and was watching the people on the street. Upon almost every face was written the tension to which he was becoming so accustomed. The national state of labour unrest with its threat of economic upheaval had become a kind of irritant poison that filtered down into the mind of every individual. In walking from his apartments to Piccadilly he had passed many people — mostly young people — and he had not seen a happy face.

The newspapers were filled with the labour situation. “All Railway Employees Threaten Early Strike,” ran the large, black headline. Among the smaller headings he noticed “Metropolitan Police not satisfied with Settlement,” “Liverpool Dock-men Refuse Terms,” “Troops Mutiny,” “Head of Transport Workers Federation Wants Revolution.”

The food situation seemed worse instead of better. In the exclusive grill where he lunched, it was pathetic to see the attempt of the management to disguise the fraility of its cuisine by the increased brilliance and intensity of its service.

Every patron of the grill-room seemed to Calvar to be touched by some awareness of the national stress. There was a hollow note in the perennial gayety about the tables as if the merriment were but a nervous affectation superimposed upon the sheer edge of an indefinable and imminent calamity.

He thought of the world as a person being gradually self-convicted of guilt, as though the very foundation of things were wrong and hopeless.

For refreshment he reflected on his new experiment, with the anticipatory throb of one who has nearly accomplished so great a thing that he fears the glory which must soon settle upon him when the thing is made known. He had set out to make a world-name for

CALVAR’S IMPORTUNITY himself, that he might emerge glowingly from the painful obscurity of his earlier life. . . . And for some reason he was now reminded of Hilda Murray.

His face changed. He thought of her with strange vindictiveness. He dwelt upon their meeting shortly to come, and there was cruelty in his black eyes and bitterness in his compressed lips.

Chapter II

Their rendezvous was one of the colonaded and bepalmed hallways of a commercialized palace of marble in Piccadilly. They were to meet before the tea crush had started and before the dance-mad companies had begun to crowd the spacious dignity of the corridors.

It was the place where Calvar usually met Hilda Murray. During the past six or seven weeks it had become his almost daily resort. Arriving customarily at four, he would stretch in a wicker chair, enjoying the artificial draught that swept through the deep space, moving the little forests of palms and rubber trees, and moulding the frocks of the fair passersby to graceful sculpture. And when the brief chime of the hotel clock intoned the quarter-hour he would sharpen his vigilance for the familiar form. Almost precisely at the same time each day she would approach with the noticeable diffidence, the short but graceful steps, and the smile that came only from her eyes. Then they would permit a hurried tea, as a grudged concession to custom, before the precious half-hour of conversation which fate sparingly allowed. It could never be more than that, for Smithers, understanding fellow that he was, could not guide the Murray limousine faster than he did ; and,

THE DAUGHTER OF WILEOWDENE with Hilda expected home by six, Willowdene was really a sharp drive distant.

For weeks now she had been coming to town each day to visit her father who was ill in a hospital, and it was while she was making one of her filial calls that Calvar had first seen her and had suddenly stopped in the court-yard to gaze after the lithe form as it disappeared behind a hedge-row. As she had passed him, a casual glance from her clear blue eyes had combined with the radiance of deep golden hair above them to give the young surgeon the colour-impression of a sunset at sea. With the lingering memory of this marine splendour, he had found specious excuse for dallying in the courtyard at the same time next day, to be rewarded, as it happened, by another glance which could not possibly have been interpreted as hostile. Although he was always susceptible to feminine charm, this accidental courtyard encounter had come upon him with something of the glamour of a discovery and, being by nature so self-willed that convention had ever to bow before caprice, he had found these glances, daily occurrences now, strong temptation to override the first rule of conversational intercourse.

Accordingly one afternoon he lay in wait for her, feeling that any further hesitancy upon his part might be construed as weakness, and also that she, in spite of her aristocratic bearing, might not object to the informality of his method.

Hilda Murray was decidedly a study on that first afternoon when Calvar impatiently awaited her coming. At length she appeared walking rapidly, and when she was so near him that he could detect the faint aroma of trailing arbutus she always used, he spoke to her.

“I’m afraid I’ve got to be rude,” he began.

She paused. In her face astonishment and amuse¬ ment mingled. Her eyes met his, then lowered as if dwelling upon his chin. It seemed to Calvar many seconds before she had completed her silent scrutiny of his face.

“Perhaps you are,” she replied.

“Why is it,” asked Calvar, “that I had to speak to you ?”

She placed the tip of her parasol in the exact middle of one of the mosaic designs of the paved court and looked up at him coyly.

“You might best answer the question yourself,” she returned.

“A gambler’s throw, I suppose.” His black eyes wandered quickly over the lavish gold of her hair. “I wanted to take a chance, you see.”

“How interesting! And the chance was ... ?”

“That I should either win or lose — ”

“Win or lose what?”

For an instant his black eyes held her — “You,” he breathed softly.

At that she seemed undecided whether to be offended or amused. But Calvar’s bearing always had something reassuring about it.

“I’ve heard of such things,” she admitted reflectively, “but I must say you are original. Doesn’t one usually commence more casually?” Her eyes were smiling.

Their conversation was made brief by her very evident fear of being seen, but before she left him he had, with considerable difficulty, obtained a promise that she would meet him for tea the following afternoon.

All her life, or, at least, since the endless decorum of Willowdene had begun to bore her, Hilda Murray had been nourishing a desire for clandestine romance. Inspired by what a young girl’s wide-open eyes could never fail to see among the respected society she cultivated, she had been forming youthful estimates of the value of variety. She had been longing for a taste of unconventionality. This versatility of soul which permits no incongruity between a drawing-room avowal and a thrilling adventure with a stranger in a West-end restaurant is a rather common development among the wives and daughters of the blase rich. Yet it is a faculty which requires for its perfection repeated practice, and Miss Murray, at twenty-three, was finding her first lessons difficult. A good habit is as difficult to overcome as a bad one, and until to-day her mother’s precepts had proved an impassable barrier. She had occasionally permitted herself the unobserved liberty of the eyes, but it had gone no further.

Next afternoon, ensconced in an alcove of a luxurious tea-room, they had found much to talk about.

“There’s one thing you didn’t tell me,” she began eagerly, “your name.”

Calvar'told her, and then asked hers.

“Murray,” she replied, not having yet learned the value of pseudonyms. There seemed something more important pressing for utterance.

“And you’re married, I suppose?” she asked.

“No,” answered the young surgeon with a definite sense of virtue, but she could not quite disguise a certain air of disappointment.

Their afternoon meetings continued, and it was not until three or four days had passed that Calvar made a discovery. It came upon him with the force of a sudden revelation.

Murray ! . . . . why had it not occurred to him before? She was visiting the hospital each day to see her father. It was fairly common knowledge that Mr. Thorne Murray was a patient there, a distinguished one indeed, with daily bulletins in the papers and other unusual accompaniments of hospital treatment. Thorne Murray was a name that carried with the general public an atmosphere of dignified and exclusive wealth, and with many men, very wealthy themselves, it carried something more, something dreaded .

So upon the following night when they met for their first dinner party, Hilda having affected a visit at a girl friend’s in order to obtain her mother’s sanction, he had a new interest in her. He was less blunt in his overtures, for the possibility of a connection with the Murray family — he was afraid to think of how close a union it might become — was already appealing to him as an ambitious prize worth the struggle. She, on the other hand, was seeking no more than a gay, secluded diversion from the strict social regimen of Willowdene. Whole days were hers to stroll in the extensive estate near Chislehurst, to converse with her mother upon the light but necessary topics of their elevated life, to dress for dances, to demur with affected bashfulness at the badinage of distinguished men, and in every way to suffer the tiresome tedium with which a wealthy home afflicted her. This dinner party with a stranger was to be her gala-night, the occasion for putting off restraint. She was inspired by the novelty of the freedom to be for once her own primitive self.

But Calvar, although having started the friendship in the spirit of light amusement, was sitting across from her at the table, his mind filled with new ambition. She did not suspect that he knew what particular Murray she was. Had she done so, their friendship, commencing as it did without a formal introduction, would be forced to a sudden ending. It was Calvar’s appreciation of her attitude which kept him from revealing his discovery. He chose to wait.

They were drinking Chianti and he had noticed the flush mounting her cheek; so that when she replaced her empty glass on the table and looked at him questioningly, he refused to pour her another.

“How priceless of you to be my protector,” she smiled. “Which means of course that I, being a free citizen of this constitutional monarchy, must help myself.” Wherewith she proceeded to fill the glass, obdurate to Calvar’s gentle caution.

The Bacchanalian suffusion rendered tantalizing a face always attractive. Calvar presently learned the wealth of repartee unlocked by the Southern vintage, and the soft, smooth pressure of a silken knee touching his own.

So it had continued, but, with the exception of occasionally allowing him the liberty of her cheek in some secluded moment, it had gone no further. Calvar gradually sensing her true attitude, as the weeks went by, came to realize that she was enjoying an innocent lark, but no more. From occasional remarks of hers he knew that marrying was an abstract idea furthest from the field of her consciousness. Disguised efforts of his for closer friendship had only served to throw a coolness over her manner. But every intensity of the impersonal Bohemian spirit in which their friendship had started, always pleased her and awakened fresh interest.

During the past week he had twice suggested her coming to his apartment, but the suggestions had been smoothly passed over without any indication that she had even heard him.

“But it’s so cosy there, Hilda,” he had insisted, “and one does not need to fear being seen.”

So she had finally consented to come, adding: “But you mustn’t ever, ever breathe it !”

For many reasons he knew that she considered him socially beneath her. He was an interesting friend with whom to explore the Bohemia of metropolitan life. Yet, although he told her nothing of his work nor of his distinctions, deciding that if he ever won her it was to be by his own personal appeal, she seemed to feel a curiosity about him and at times a mere suggestion of affection.

Up to the present he had employed the method of waiting, but to one who had always frankly and strongly demanded what he wanted, and then fought for it until he got it, this method was becoming more and more discredited. With characteristic impatience he was beginning to tire of it and he was beginning to demand. Her attitude of social superiority did not so much hurt him, since he recognized no cult save that of personal ability, but her unconscious manner of stooping to him had at times awakened a deep class-hatred within him. He felt it strongly, instinctively. He feared it. He could not explain it. As though it were something that had lain dormant all his life and was only now awakening beneath the touch of a patronizing hand, this passion of hatred seemed to him like an untamable beast, stretching its limbs with latent purpose. He, who through all his life had obtained each thing he set his heart upon, was now at last crossed and hindered from the beautiful and expensive prize his ambition craved. The method of waiting had failed. She had ignored his honest bids for friendship.

At last the opportunity he sought had arrived. Her proximity in the lilac-shadowed room, the near breath¬ lessness and surrender of it all . . . and then would she go from him?

As Calvar sat waiting for her in the corridor of the hotel, his mood was broken only by the conversation of some people seated near him. They were discussing the labour situation.

“If much greater latitude is allowed to Labour,” a well-dressed man of fifty was saying, “then I have no hesitancy- in predicting an early crisis — that is to say, in our special industry, at least.”

“And you know,” said another member of the group, “it’s so frightfully difficult to say just where the thing will stop. Cost of labour doubled, cost of raw materials trebled. It’s unheard of !”

“It’s still more difficult to say what will stop prices from soaring.”

“The balance between supply and demand ; there lies the whole solution.”

“Suppose we ask Mr. Austin what he thinks about the mess things are in?”

Mr. Austin, who had not spoken as yet, seemed to command much influence with the rest. They waited as he hesitated before speaking.

“I think, gentlemen,” he began at length, “it would pay us to work out the present labour problem upon a psychological basis. I have tried to do so in my factories in Birmingham. There is a general mental unrest every¬ where. The entire labour problem is a tangle. Economical problems prove to be wheels within wheels : they do not explain. I shall tell you my notion, even at the risk of being criticised. This unsolvable contentiousness between capital and labour is deeper than a mere industrial problem. It is really the antithesis of Christianity. That statement applies to both sides, I’m afraid, because, under the present unmerciful dispensation in industrial matters, no man, capitalist or labourer, can be a Christian and at the same time pay expenses. This gross selfishness has spread broadcast over the country and the world, for that matter. As to that, I fancy the man who wrote the Book of Revelation foreshadowed it in his symbolic figure of the Beast.”

Soon the conversation was lost to Calvar in the sound of the hotel clock chiming the hour of his meeting with Hilda. He straightened himself in his chair and watched the entrance.

At last. . . . His heart thumped wildly as she advanced to meet him. He had never seen her so at¬ tractive as now, in a gown of soft rose that hung in heavy, graceful folds ; gold beneath the black hat and blue beneath the gold.

Calvar could scarcely wait for greetings.

“Shall we go now?” he asked.

She found a chair and looked up at him, her face a little tired.

“Do let me sit down a while, I’m so weary.”

After they had talked a few moments Calvar asked her the question again. She paused a moment.

“I’d rather stay here,” she said, “but I told you I would go — so we may as well start. But listen, promise me — ”

“What?”

“That you won’t — ”

“I would have no reason to tell anyone about it,” he assured her.

So they walked to New Burlington Street, talking little as they went.

To Calvar, their meeting was to be the consummation of a desire long entertained. To Hilda, it was to be but further adventures in her new Bohemia.

Calvar’s manner betrayed a slight nervousness as they ascended the staircase, for he was wondering if Mary Durand had left the house. Somehow he could not think of her as he unlocked the door of his apartment and stood aside for Hilda to enter.

As she did so she paused and cast her eyes over the room.

“I think it’s a perfectly priceless place, old dear,” she exclaimed, her reserve giving over to the inspiration of the moment.

“I’m glad you like my digs,” he said as he took her furs. “You might find the couch most comfortable.”

“Thanks ! but I shall try this lovely old chair for a while.”

When she was seated Calvar excused himself and went in search of his servant.

Presently the Hindu brought them glasses and a large decanter.

“I’m so glad you’ve brought me some wine,” said Hilda, accepting a glass. “I need something to buck me up. Do you know, I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“What was the trouble?” asked Calvar, taking a chair opposite.

“Well, you see, I’ll have to compliment you, if I tell you. I imagine I was excited about meeting you to-day. Isn’t a woman foolish to confide as much to any man?”

Calvar raised his glass and Hilda poised hers grace¬ fully.

“Sante, Mam’selle.”

“Sante, M’sieur,” she replied, as she touched the glass to her lips, “are we not in Paris now?”

“That’s a bright idea, Hilda,” he answered, lowering his glass. “Let us imagine this room an artist’s studio. I am, of course, the penurious artist and you are the fine lady who has come to encourage me in my work.”