All Kneeling/Chapter 3

by Anne Parrish

Chapter Three

"Well," said Boyd Benjamin, leaning in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of her coat, her cigarette wagging to her words, "I must say this place looks exactly like you."

"It is nice," Christabel agreed.

"Everything done?"

"Everything but the curtains. Gobby Witherspoon said he'd come in and help me hang them."

"Gobby's having a wonderful time thinking he's in love with you!"

Poor old Boyd, Christabel thought. Imagine having to get one's emotional satisfaction from another woman's love affairs! And she saw herself as she must seem to strong clumsy Boyd—fragile and flower-like, surrounded by adorers; the fairy-tale princess whose glamour poor old Boyd must share, if only in imagination. She answered, warmly gentle:

"He's been perfect to me. You all have. I wonder why?"

"So do I!" Boyd gave her an affectionate blow with a large hand. "You noticed I said thinking he's in love with you."

"Yes, I did. I don't think you do Gobby justice, Boyd. I think just because he's so sensitive and because he does things—well, like making these curtains—you don't any of you realize how much depth and strength there is there. Take Elliott Foster, for instance. Gobby's perfectly devoted to Elliott, and I know Elliott thinks Gobby's a light-weight."

"Now Elliott! There's a different matter. There's somebody who really is in love with you."

"Oh no, Boyd! Nonsense! He isn't at all!"

"All right, you know best. Do you want me to screw the teacup hooks into the cupboard?"

"Thank you. They're—Oh, you've found them. What in the world makes you have such a wild idea? About Elliott, I mean?"

"Oh, nothing."

"No, really, Boyd. He hasn't been near me all week."

"Doesn't that just prove what I'm telling you? He doesn't dare come. He's afraid to admit to himself the way he's feeling. But I saw him looking at you the other day."

"When did you?"

"Up in the studio the day you were all there for tea. You went over to the window and said something about the first star, and he sat looking at you as if he was bewitched, and then grabbed his hat and bolted. Don't you remember?"

Christabel remembered. She could see the scene as clearly as if she were sitting in the front row of a theatre. The firelight shining on Boyd's paintings of passionate petunias and eggplants of heroic size, Boyd with her short hair and manly clothes leaning against the mantelpiece, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth; gentle Gobby with his turquoise bangle, on a cricket close to the blaze, having one last piece of pastry; Donatia Platt, so affected and arty, all big beads and hammered silver, acting like a fool over Elliott Foster. And Christabel herself in her autumnleaf-brown dress, her face and throat warm ivory in the firelight, outlined against deepening blue. She could even hear her voice saying, "The first star"; she was touched by the sadness in it. Certainly soon after that Elliott had gone, together with the unattractive Platt. At the time it had not seemed significant, but now, in the light of Boyd's words——

"He's fighting it," said Boyd. "He's afraid you'll interfere with his work. In fact, I don't believe he even knows he's in love with you, yet, but I do. Look! Look what's coming! Welcome, little Goblin!"

"Take off my hat for me, Boyd; I haven't a hand. Greetings, Lady Christabel!"

"Unload him, Christabel. Gobby, don't you know it isn't the thing to come through the streets of the great city wrapped in sea-green sik? You might be misunderstood."

"I've had hundreds of little boys following me for blocks. That's your last pair of curtains, Christabel. Hlere's a pot of carnations, my dear. Did you think you could get them in pots outside of Italy? Put it here by the Della Robbia—— Look, please look at Boyd's expression of suffering! I suppose we seem very old-fashioned and sentimental to her. And, my dears, look at this old copper tray I got from a Russian Jew in Allen Street! You'll always have to sit so that it comes behind your head, like a halo—look! Sweet Saint Christabel!"

"What's in this?"

"Dear Boyd, you're so curious. Cherry tarts, in hopes Christabel will ask me to stay to tea."

"Oh, I do! I ask you both!"

"Can't, thanks. 'By, children."

"How brusque Boyd is," Gobby observed, unwinding a huge pale-blue muffler. "Have you an old newspaper to put on this chair? And if you'll hand me the curtain rod. There's something perfectly ruthless about her—and as for her flower paintings, they frighten me to death. Those obscene calla lilies! Are these folds all right?"

"Just a teeny bit more—there. But surely you don't take her paintings seriously, do you, Gobby? Nobody does, do they, except, of course, poor darling old Boyd herself? Oh, oh, how sweet it looks! The curtains make all the difference in the world!"

"It's a perfect background for you now."

"Is it, Gobby? Am I nice enough for this lovely room? How good you've all been about helping me—I can't imagine why! You, Elliott——"

"Oh, that reminds me—I saw Elliott, and he said he was coming over. He was going to stop at Donatia Platt's first for her book of Beardsley drawings he said he'd promised to lend you!"

"I think he's in love with Donatia."

"Well, she's in love with him, and I did think he was with her, sort of; not crazy, the way she is, but I always thought Elliott had a mother-fixation, and I thought he'd sort of transferred it to Donatia. Shall I fill the kettle?

The samovar boils on my table of oak
 And my bed with chintz curtains is seen,
Within the dark something the something awoke—"

"What——?"

"Dostoevski. The Insulted and Injured."

"I wasn't going to say, 'What is it?' I was going to say, 'What a marvelous book it is!' What were we talking about? Oh, Donatia."

"Yes, and Elliott. He really seems to have been avoiding her for the last week or so."

"She's a lovely person."

"Yes, she's a wonderful girl——look, shall we draw the curtains, or leave them open?"

"Leave them open." And she almost said, "So we can see that first little star, like a silver fish in a deep blue sea," but since Elliott was coming she decided to save it. "But, Gobby, I do feel something about Donatia—you know I have this queer way of feeling people, sometimes I think that's why I get so exhausted. I get simply limp, and yet I wouldn't be less sensitive, though one does pay a terrible price. But I do feel something not quite—well, not quite fine about her."

"Oh, well, of course she's small-town Middle West. Her name really was Harriet Ruth; she changed it to Donatia to go with her personality. Did Elliott tell you? I think she does pretty well, considering, but naturally, compared with you——"

"Oh, now, I don't mean that——come in! Elliott! Just in time, the kettle's boiling, and look! The first star peeping through my sea-green curtains! It's a little silver fish in the deep blue ocean of dusk. See, Elliott. The first star."

 

"My work must come first, always," said Christabel, as they sat with their empty teacups. And gazing into the fire that leaped and fell, she saw long days packed full of work, she felt herself tingling with work that could be done now that the curtains were up and the teacup hooks screwed in.

Gobby slowly licked cherry juice from his fingers. "Well, I like work myself, sort of—sometimes. That reminds me, don't forget you're posing for me tomorrow. Heavens! I wish some one would get just that turn of the head. Look, Elliott! Don't move, Christabel! Look at that, with the firelight on her cheek and throat—which is she, fire or snow?"

"You make me sound like a Maeterlinck character."

She knew now what to think of Maeterlinck. She had loved him when she lived in Germantown. He had given her unhappy princesses, lost and wailing in the mist, their hair falling about them in shining cascades; graves suddenly blossoming with lilies; velvet bees with soap-bubble-colored wings, flying home to secret golden hives. But since Elliott and Gobby and Boyd had laughed indulgently and said, "Good old Maeterlinck!" the magus, the keeper of the mysteries, had become the good old prestidigitator, whose most famous trick was to produce from his sleeve a flock of bluebirds that nested in hundreds of Tea Rooms and Gifte Shoppes everywhere.

Barrie was lost to her, too. She had said "Barrie——" and instantly they had responded:

"Oh, Barrie——!"

"Delicious Barrie!"

"Charming Barrie!"

"And now all together, boys and girls! One, two, three——"

"Whimsical Barrie!"

And she had known she didn't think so much of Barrie. But she must read some—what was it? Dostoevski.

"Only to Give, Give, Give," she wrote in her Secret Journal. "To Sing with a clear shiningness, no matter out of what loneliness and pain, and make the Song the sweeter for the suffering. To feel the happy-hurt of the Beauty-of-Things, and make others feel it. To share the Bread of Beauty through my Work."

Gobby liked that phrase particularly when she showed it to him. He was doing a portrait of her, and so was Elliott. Gobby's, like all his pictures, was made from bits of mirror, carpet fuzz dyed with Easter-egg dyes, and the insides of alarm clocks, but Elliott's was a recognizable Christabel.

As the sittings went on she couldn't help feeling sure that Boyd was right about Elliott loving her. When she thought of Donatia Platt there was a warm, breathless lightness in her chest instead of the clenched heaviness she had felt before. She went out of her way to see Donatia now, to praise her to Elliott, who answered absent-mindedly. And when people reported catty remarks made about her by Donatia, she tried only to pity her.

She was getting ready to go to Donatia's one afternoon when Gobby arrived.

"I'm taking her over some things for her party tonight. You can help me carry them. My wine-glasses, and that bunch of calendulas. I thought they'd go with her orange curtains."

"Oh, Christabel, you're awfully sweet, but——"

"But what, Gobby?"

"Well—let me take them. Don't you bother."

"Nonsense! Why shouldn't I go?"

"Well, you're too sweet and loving to understand, but I think maybe—well, I mean, you know how Donatia feels about Elliott, and how Elliott feels about you——"

"What perfect nonsense!"

"Oh, I know! You have to be told a thousand times before you believe anyone l—likes you. But Donatia knows how Elliott feels, if you don't. Well, to tell you the truth, though I haven't any business to, I've just been there and she was crying, and she sort of burst out about how she wished she was dead——"

"Oh, poor girl! I must hurry to her! You're mistaken, Gobby. It's Donatia Elliott loves. He doesn't love me." She pulled on her embroidered cap before the mirror, fluffing out dark auburn tendrils over her ears, looking deep into her own shining eyes. "I don't say that he didn't think he was—well, crazy about me for a little while, but of course I had to stop that, knowing how Donatia felt, and that's why the way she's acting now does hurt me a little, when I've done everything to try to make Elliott appreciate her. I wouldn't say this to anyone in the world but you, Gobby, but Donatia hasn't been very kind to me, and so I must love her just twice as hard, don't you see?"

Donatia's eyes were red and her voice hard when Christabel and Gobby came in with their offerings, but that evening she was blazing with laughter and excitement. What does Elliott see inher? Christabel thought, watching them together. Make-up just plastered on—and her voice when she gets excited! Donatia, indeed! Harriet Ruth Platt. The clenched tightness came back in her chest. She called:

"Elliott! Come here a minute!" And then: "Oh, Donatia darling! Were you talking to him? I didn't notice! Keep him!"

Will he come? she thought, will he come? And her whole being willed, Come, so intensely that she felt weak with relief when he said, "Excuse me a minute, Donatia," and came across the room.

She began to talk wildly to anybody, everybody but Elliott, hearing her own voice as if it belonged to some one else, glowing from the admiring laughter that broke over her words. "She's turned the hostess into an innocent bystander," she heard a girl whisper; but the man she whispered to only answered, "Did you hear what that was she said?"

"What did you say those mandarin oranges were, Christabel?"

"Mandarin oranges are Chinese emperors. Fat little men in imperial yellow crêpe, with their hands tucked into their sleeves."

"What are the grapes? Ask her what the grapes are."

"Oh, the grapes are the emperors' smooth little concubines in their robes of water-green silk."

"Let's be emperors and concubines! Let's dress up!"

"I speak for the sofa cover!"

"I choose that batik!"

"I have an idea. Where's your white scarf with the gold embroidery, Donatia? You know, that one I gave you?"

"Here it is, Elliott! What are you going to be?"

"I want it for Christabel. Here, let me bind it tight around your head and under your chin. Cross your hands, this way. My God! Look, everybody! Look! Did you ever see such a marvelous mediæval Madonna?"

"She must be in a shrine. Here, lift her up on the table! Give us the flowers, Donatia, and look—put the candles around her. On your knees, worshipers!"

"I'll never forget you with that white-and-gold thing round your head," Elliott told Christabel, taking her home. "You've never looked so lovely. Listen! Why don't we go back and borrow it from Donatia and you come over tomorrow morning and let me do a sketch of you? Come on!"

"Oh, we can't go back now!"

"Why not? We haven't been gone five minutes. She won't be in bed or anything."

"I don't think she'll want to lend it to me."

"She'll love to lend it to you."

"I'm afraid not. I wouldn't say this to anyone in the world but you, Elliott, but Donatia hasn't been very kind to me."

"Now you're doing her an injustice. You feel things that aren't intended, you're so sensitive and tender-hearted."

"Do I, Elliott? Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I am unjust to her. Anyway, I feel that you're a very understanding person, and if you say so, we'll go back."

Donatia's face was scarlet as she opened the door to them, and the room was filled with a smell of burning. "My scarf? Yes, of course." She looked around the room, and Christabel looked, too. Candle grease, grape skins, a macaroon crushed into the rug, Gobby's blue muffler left behind. "Some one must have gone off with it. It isn't here."

Christabel looked only once at the filmy charred rag of white and gold in the fireplace. She threw her arms around Donatia and kissed her scorched cheek, crying, "You've given us a heavenly evening!" before she ran—floated—flew down the stairs, hand in hand with Elliott.