The Gray Sisters

In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a tenement of which the ground floor was a small "lock-up" greengrocer's shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters.

It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying outer leaves, and there was usually a cat or two about, licking up the last splash left by the milkman's can. When a new milkman took the round he was lucky if he did not come down all-fours at the bottom of the narrow winding staircase that turned off sharp to the right. The staircase itself was as black as the inside of a pair of bellows, and a piece of paper at the foot of it bore two names:

Miss Dorothy Lennard

Miss Amory Towers

These were followed by the words: "First Floor: if Out, leave Parcels at Shop."

The landing of the first floor was slightly less black than the staircase itself, but the grey half-light filtered through, not from any window, but from the unhinged side of the door of the room rented by Miss Lennard and Miss Towers. As if the landing had been damp and the room beyond warm (which possibly was the case), this door, which was of thin matchboarding, warped inwards quite two inches at the top, and, indeed, seemed to be held only by the fastening in the middle. When the door happened to be locked the glimpse through this crack was always productive of a slight annoyance. It was as if Miss Dorothy Lennard or Miss Amory Towers was nearly in, or not quite gone away, or in any case must be returning in a few minutes. People often waited for quite a long time before finally giving up hope.

Early on an April afternoon some years ago there walked quickly into the entry and ran confidently up the dark stairs a tall young woman in a large black picture-hat and a long tea-coloured silk raincoat. On the first landing she pushed at the door with her foot. There was a short succession of flapping and shot-like sounds (for if the door skellowed inwards at the top it stuck correspondingly at the bottom), and then the door started open and the young woman entered.

"Amory!" she called loudly. "Where are you?"

The last words were superfluous, since (unless she had climbed out of the long front casement and on to the gutter) it was not possible for Miss Towers to be in hiding in the room. And out of the square aperture at the back, that commanded a view of washing, weeds, discarded bottles, the greengrocer's "empties" and the back gardens of the west side of Oakley Street, she could not as much as have got her head. Nor did Miss Lennard wait for an answer. Down the chimney opposite the door there came a dense yellow cauliflower of smoke; Miss Lennard hastily closed the door again; and then, first looking for a moment this way and that, she strode to a black-and-white desk near the long casement and began to turn over the litter upon it. This, which was a foot and more high, consisted of magazines and ladies' journals and tracing-paper and proofs, and it was surmounted, first, by a plate with a couple of bananas and a half-eaten bunch of grapes upon it, and secondly, by a glass of water, clear above, cloudy in the middle, and with a thick reddish sediment at the bottom. As she sought, Miss Lennard popped three or four grapes into her large O of a mouth, throwing the skins towards the fireplace, from which another opaque yellow cauliflower poured, though this time not quite so far out into the room. She had removed her gloves; her hands were large and firm and waxen and without rings; and one or other of them found its way of itself to the grapes while the other continued its search.

The smoking of the chimney had blackened the ceiling, which bellied downwards in the middle like the under side of a giant's mattress; and it had also dimmed the surfaces of such of the brighter objects of furniture as the cheap working-room contained-the picture-glasses, the gate-legged table, a bowl full of dead daffodils, and some crockery. But Miss Lennard and Miss Towers frequently said that it was not for the inside of the room, but for the sake of the views from the long lattice in front, that they had chosen the place. These were for ever changing and charming. From a standpoint just within the door you looked over the Embankment Gardens and saw, through trees, lighters following the bullying tugs, or barges, their sails reefed to the sprits, resembling tall attenuated figures in the act of grasping punting-poles. Placing yourself in the middle of the worn floor you saw, crossed out as it were by the middle lattice, the Chelsea Jelly Factory and other buildings across the river. And standing quite by the fireplace you saw the lacy lines of the Suspension Bridge and the low grey-green trees of Battersea Park. As the chimney emitted more yellow curds, Miss Lennard, with an "Ugh!" opened the middle section of this window. The papers among which she had been searching were instantly whisked across the floor.

"Bother the thing!" she muttered. "How stupid if it's at Oxford Street all the time!... I say, Amory, have you seen that Doubleday thing? You know-the Chemisettes. I was sure I'd left it here."

The door had rattled again, and Miss Amory Towers had entered.

Miss Towers did not answer at once. From a brown pudding-bowl of a hat with a silken cord round it, she drew out two enamel-headed hatpins, and hung the hat on a hook. Its removal showed her rich hair no longer in a plait, but wreathed round and round her head and interplaited until it resembled a vividly painted fir cone. She wore a peacock's-neck-coloured blouse with several necklaces of iridescent shells at the collar; a roughened leather belt encircled the waist that would have been large had she herself not been so small; and, while the breeze from the open window rippled in Dorothy's tea-coloured raincoat, it hardly stirred the folds of Amory's heavier skirt of dusty-looking brown velvet.

She moved to the window. "I haven't touched your things," she said.

Then she stood, half leaning against the embrasure, gazing moodily across the river.

Certainly she was fetchingly pretty. As if you had looked at her through one of the very weak reducing-glasses illustrators use in order to see how their work will diminish, so her features had not only a special smallness, but somehow a special brightness of their own as well. The slight neck was white as a bluebell stalk; the faint flower-like stippling that never quite broke through into avowed freckles reminded you of a rubbed old miniature that might have been painted, not on ivory, but on a lamina of pale gold; and her inordinate hair lighted up the whole casement angle. But she was perturbed about something. She watched a string of lighters drift down with the tide, and then, without turning her head, said, "Dorothy--"

Dorothy, who had been once more searching among the scattered papers, rose from her knees. She held a piece of paper in her hand. "Got it!" she cried triumphantly. "I knew I'd left it here.... What?"

"Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?"

"Thank goodness I haven't trailed all the way from Oxford Street for nothing!... Aunt Jerry? No. What about her?"

"She's going to be married."

Ordinarily Dorothy Lennard's blue eyes were wide, receptive rounds; in moments of surprise they always seemed to open to twice their size. They did so now.

"No!... Oh, my dear, do tell me, quick."

"Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house."

"Mr.--? Not the safety-valve?" she cried.

"Yes."

"My-dear!... But he's forty if he's a day," Dorothy exclaimed.

"He's forty-three. Aunt Jerry's thirty-eight."

"Oh, but she's such a darling! Have they told people yet? May I write her a note? When are they going to be married?" Miss Lennard came as near to asking the three questions all in one as was physically possible.

"Write if you like. They're getting married in July. I call it--"

But instead of saying what she called it Amory turned impatiently to the window again. She was biting the corner of her upper lip.

"Why," said Dorothy, checked in her glee, "what's the matter?"

But Amory did not speak. She had been about to say, if a thing so obvious needed to be said, that it was ridiculous (to say the least) for people of thirty-eight and forty-three to be thinking about marriage; but that was not all. There were other things, that, since Dorothy could not understand them even if she did say them, were perhaps not worth wasting breath over. Not that Dorothy was actually dull; but for all that Amory had almost ceased to hope that Dorothy would ever grasp her, Amory's, true position. Their circumstances were so very different. Of course Amory was ready to concede that Dorothy, like herself, did contrive to live on what she earned; she earned from thirty to thirty-five shillings a week as a fashion artist; but it was one thing to make do on that, with people behind you to catch you when you stumbled, and quite another to have (as Amory had under her godmother's will) a scanty thirteen pounds a quarter, to sell a sketch or a picture once in a blue moon, and to know that that is all the help you need look forward to. Dorothy would quickly have found out the difference had it been she, Amory, who had had the people with houses in town and places up and down the country, and herself, Dorothy, who had been the daughter of a poor and clever Cambridge practitioner who had died before he had managed to get on his feet, and had left his daughter to live with the only relative she had in the world in a hateful boarding-house in Shepherd's Bush! And it was all very fine for Dorothy to joke about it, and to say that the fewer relatives she had the luckier she was. There was no getting away from it: these things did give a confidence to Dorothy's stride, and an assurance to her glance, and an expectation of success to her eyes.

Therefore Amory did not answer when her friend asked her what was the matter.

But Dorothy, after a moment's cogitation, contrived, though probably by accident, to hit on what was the matter for herself.

"I must write to her at once," she said. "In July-so soon! I am glad! I do hope they'll be happy!... And what'll you do? Go on living at the boarding-house?"

Ah! (Amory thought), so Dorothy did see it from somebody's point of view besides Aunt Jerry's! She moved one shoulder petulantly.

"Aunt Jerry paid the bills there," she said.