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The Pretty Lady: A Novel, a novel by Arnold Bennett |
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Chapter 39. Idyll |
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_ Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mere Gaston, the new servant in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to "Hoape, Albany": "Give it to me. I will put it in front of the clock on the mantelpiece." And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. She did so with a little gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a whole. The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J. in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it even to her memory of G.J.'s flat in the Albany. Its golden ornateness flattered her. The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. She had never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like it. But then Gilbert was always better than his word. He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith. Judiciously, she had never made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs. Carlos Smith in the tenancy. And when Gilbert told her that he had had his eye on the flat for her before Mrs. Carlos Smith took it, and had hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud. And reassured also. For this detail was a proof that Gilbert had really had the intention to put her "among her own furniture" long before the night of the supreme appeal to him.... Only he was always so cautious. And Gilbert was the discoverer of la mere Gaston, too, and as frank about her as about the flat. La mere Gaston was the widow of a French soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her. A few weeks earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding had fallen ill for a space, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as charwoman to aid Mrs. Braiding's young sister in the Albany flat. With excellent judgment Gilbert had chosen her to succeed Marthe, whom he himself had reproachfully dismissed from Cork Street. He was amazingly clever, was Gilbert, for he had so arranged things that Christine had been able to cut off her Cork Street career as with a knife. She had departed from Cork Street with two trunks and a few cardboard boxes--her stove was abandoned to the landlord--and vanished into London and left no trace. Except Gilbert, nobody who knew her in Cork Street was aware of her new address, and nobody who knew her in Mayfair knew that she had come from Cork Street. Her ancient acquaintances in Cork Street would ring the bell there in vain. Madame Gaston was a neat, plump woman of perhaps forty, not looking her years. She had a comprehending eye. After three words from Gilbert she had mastered the situation, and as she perfectly realised where her interest lay she could be relied upon for discretion. In all delicate matters only her eye talked. She was a Protestant, and went to the French church in Soho Square, which she called the "Temple". Christine and she had had but one Sunday together--and Christine had gone with her to the Temple! The fact was that Christine had decided to be a Protestant. She needed a religion, and Catholicism had an inconvenience--confession. She had regularised her position, so much so that by comparison with the past she was now perfectly respectable. Yet if she had been candid in the confessional the priest would still have convicted her of mortal sin; which would have been very unfair; and she could not, in view of her respectability, have remained a Catholic without confessing, however infrequently. Madame Gaston, as soon as she was sure of her convert, referred to Catholicism as "idolatry". "Put your apron on, Marie," said Christine. "Monsieur will be here directly." "Ah, yes, madame!" "Have you opened the kitchen-window to take away the smell of cooking?" "Yes, madame." "Am I all right, Marie?" Madame Gaston surveyed her mistress, who turned round. "Yes, madame. I think that monsieur will much like that _negligee_." She departed to don the apron. Between these two it was continually "monsieur," "monsieur". He was seldom there, but he was always there, always being consulted, placated, invoked, revered, propitiated, magnified. He was the giver of all good, and there was no other Allah, and he had two prophets. Christine sang, she twittered, she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful joy. She had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune had washed her pure. She looked at herself in the massive bevelled mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful. And she felt triumphant. Gilbert had expressed the fear that she might get lonely and bored. He had even said that occasionally he might bring along a man, and that perhaps the man would have a very nice woman friend. She had not very heartily responded. She was markedly sympathetic towards Englishmen, but towards English women--no! And especially she did not want to know any English women in the same situation as herself. Lonely? Impossible! Bored? Impossible! She had an establishment. She had a civil list. Her days passed like an Arabian dream. She never had an unfilled moment, and when each day was over she always remembered little things which she had meant to do and had not found time to do. She was a superb sleeper, and arose at noon. Three o'clock usually struck before her day had fairly begun--unless, of course, she happened to be very busy, in which case she would be ready for contact with the world at the lunch-hour. Her main occupation was to charm, allure, and gratify a man; for that she lived. Her distractions were music, the reading of novels, _Le Journal_, and _Les Grandes Modes_. And for the war she knitted. In her new situation it was essential that she should do something for the war. Therefore she knitted, being a good knitter, and her knitting generally lay about. She popped into the dining-room to see if the table was well set for dinner. It was, but in order to show that Marie did not know everything, she rearranged somewhat the flowers in the central bowl. Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and waited. The instant of arrival approached. Gilbert's punctuality was absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. She could not have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexactitude of her clock.... The bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a five-finger exercise. Often in the old life she had executed upon him this innocent subterfuge, to make him think she practised the piano to a greater extent than she actually did, that indeed she was always practising. It never occurred to her that he was not deceived. Hear Marie fly to the front door! See Christine's face, see her body, as in her pale, bright gown she peeps round the half-open door of the drawing-room! She lives, then. Her eyes sparkle for the giver of all good, for the adored, and her brow is puckered for him, and the jewels on her hand burn for him, and every pleat of her garments visible and invisible is pleated for him. She is a child. She has snatched up a chocolate, and put it between her teeth, and so she offers the half of it to him, smiling, silent. She is a child, but she is also a woman intensely skilled in her art.... "Monster!" she said. "Come this way." And she led him down the tunnel to the bedroom. There, in a corner of the bathroom, stood an antique closed toilet-stand, such as was used by men in the days before splashing and sousing were invented. She had removed it from the drawing-room. "Open it," she commanded. He obeyed. Its little compartments, which had been empty, were filled with a man's toilet instruments--brushes, file, scissors, shaving-soap (his own brand), a safety-razor, &c. The set was complete. She had known exactly the requirements. "It is a little present from thy woman," she said. "In future thou wilt have no excuse--Sit down. Marie!" "Madame?" "Take off the boots of Monsieur." Marie knelt. Christine found the new slippers. "And now this!" she said, after he had washed and used the new brushes, producing a black house-jacket with velvet collar and cuffs. "How tired thou must be after thy day!" she murmured, patting him with tiny pats. "Thou knowest, my little one," she said, pointing to the gas-stove in the bedroom fireplace. "For the other rooms a gas-stove--I am indifferent. But the bedroom is something else. The bedroom is sacred. I could not tolerate a gas-stove in the bedroom. A coal fire is necessary to me. You do not think so?" "Yes," he said. "You are quite right. It shall be seen to." "Can I give the order? Thou permittest me to give the order?" "Certainly." In the drawing-room she cushioned him well in the best easy-chair, and, sitting down on a pouf near him, began to knit like an industrious wife who understands the seriousness of war. Nothing escaped the attention of that man. He espied the telegram. "What's that?" "Ah!" she cried, springing up and giving it to him. "Stupid that I am! I forgot." He looked at the address. "How did this come here?" he asked mildly. "Marie brought it--from the Albany." "Oh!" He opened the telegram and read it, having dropped the envelope into the silk-lined, gilded waste-paper basket by the fender. "It is nothing serious?" she questioned. "No. Business." He might have shown it to her--he had shown her telegrams before--but he stuck it into his pocket. Then, without a word to Christine, he rang the bell, and Marie appeared. "Marie! The telegram--why did you bring it here?" "Monsieur, it was like this. I went to monsieur's flat to fetch two aprons that I had left there. The telegram was on the console in the ante-chamber. Knowing that monsieur was to come direct here, I brought it." "Does Mrs. Braiding know you brought it?" "Ah! As for Mrs. Braiding, monsieur--" Marie stopped, disclaiming any responsibility for Mrs. Braiding, of whom she was somewhat jealous. "I thought to do well." "I am sure of it. But surely you can see you have been indiscreet. Don't do it again." "No, monsieur. I ask pardon of monsieur." Immediately afterwards he said to Christine in a gay, careless tone: "And this gas-stove here? Is it all right? Have we tried it? Let us try it." "The weather is warm, dearest." "But just to try it. I always like to satisfy myself--in time." "Fusser!" she exclaimed, and ignited the stove. He gazed at it absently, then picked up a cigarette and, taking the telegram from his pocket, folded it into a spill and with it lit the cigarette. "Yes," he said meditatively. "It seems not a bad stove." And he held the spill till it had burnt to his finger-ends. Then he extinguished the stove. She said to herself: "He has burned the telegram on purpose. But how cleverly he did it! Ah! That man! There is none but him!" She was disquieted about the telegram. She feared it. Her superstitiousness was awakened. She thought of her apostasy from Catholicism to Protestantism. She thought of a Holy Virgin angered. And throughout the evening and throughout the night, amid her smiles and teasings and coaxings and caresses and ecstasies and all her accomplished, voluptuous girlishness, the image of a resentful Holy Virgin flitted before her. Why should he burn a business telegram? Also, was he not at intervals a little absent-minded? _ |
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