The Roll-Call | Page 5

east. The legend
of these vanished resorts of pleasure and vice stirred his longings and
his sense of romantic beauty--especially Ranelagh with its Rotunda.
(He wanted, when the time came, to be finely vicious, as he wanted to
be everything. An architect could not be great without being
everything.) He projected himself into the Rotunda, with its sixty
windows, its countless refreshment-boxes, its huge paintings, and the
orchestra in the middle, and the expensive and naughty crowd walking
round and round and round on the matting, and the muffled footsteps
and the swish of trains on the matting, and the specious smiles and
whispers, and the blare of the band and the smell of the lamps and
candles.... Earl's Court was a poor, tawdry, unsightly thing after that.
When he had passed under the Workhouse tower he came to a side
street which, according to Haim's description of the neighbourhood,
ought to have been Alexandra Grove. The large lamp on the corner,
however, gave no indication, nor in the darkness could any sign be seen

on the blind wall of either of the corner houses in Fulham Road.
Doubtless in daytime the street had a visible label, but the borough
authorities evidently believed that night endowed the stranger with
powers of divination. George turned hesitant down the mysterious
gorge, which had two dim lamps of its own, and which ended in a high
wall, whereat could be descried unattainable trees--possibly the grove
of Alexandra. Silence and a charmed stillness held the gorge, while in
Fulham Road not a hundred yards away omnibuses and an occasional
hansom rattled along in an ordinary world. George soon decided that he
was not in Alexandra Grove, on account of the size of the houses. He
could not conceive Mr. Haim owning one of them. They stood lofty in
the gloom, in pairs, secluded from the pavement by a stucco
garden-wall and low bushes. They were double-fronted, and their doors
were at the summits of flights of blanched steps that showed through
the bars of iron gates. They had three stories above a basement. Still, he
looked for No. 8. But just as the street had no name, so the houses had
no numbers. No. 16 alone could be distinguished; it had figures on its
faintly illuminated fanlight. He walked back, idly counting.
Then, amid the curtained and shuttered facades, he saw, across the road,
a bright beam from a basement. He crossed and peeped through a gate,
and an interior was suddenly revealed to him. Near the window of a
room sat a young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in
the wall, a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it,
threw a strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living
picture, framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him.
All the splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and
invalidated and destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near
to him. (Nevertheless, for a moment he thought of her as the daughter
of Sir Thomas More.) She was drawing. She was drawing with her
whole mind and heart. At intervals, scarcely moving her head, she
would glance aside at a paper to her left on the table.... She seemed to
search it, to drag some secret out of it, and then she would resume her
drawing. She was neither dark nor fair; she was comely, perhaps
beautiful; she had beautiful lips, and her nose, behind the nostrils,
joined the cheek in a lovely contour, like a tiny bulb. Yes, she was
superb. But what mastered him was less her fresh physical charm than

the rapt and extreme vitality of her existing.... He knew from her
gestures and the tools on the table that she could be no amateur. She
was a professional. He thought: Chelsea!... Marvellous place, Chelsea!
He ought to have found that out long ago. He imagined Chelsea full of
such pictures--the only true home of beauty and romance.
Then the impact of a single idea startled his blood. He went hot. He
flushed. He had tingling sensations all down his back, and in his legs
and in his arms. It was as though he had been caught in a dubious
situation. Though he was utterly innocent, he felt as though he had
something to be ashamed of. The idea was: she resembled old Haim,
facially! Ridiculous idea! But she did resemble old Haim, particularly
in the lobal termination of the nose. And in the lips too. And there was
a vague, general resemblance. Absurd! It was a fancy.... He would not
have cared for anybody to be watching him then, to surprise him
watching her. He heard unmistakable footsteps on the pavement. A
policeman darkly approached.