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_ There was a tremendous opening of doors in the Hotel de Vezelay,
and much whispering on thresholds, as the executioner and his band
entered solemnly. Sophia heard them tramp upstairs; they seemed to
hesitate, and then apparently went into a room on the same landing
as hers. A door banged. But Sophia could hear the regular sound of
new voices talking, and then the rattling of glasses on a tray.
The conversation which came to her from the windows of the hotel
now showed a great increase of excitement. She could not see the
people at these neighbouring windows without showing her own head,
and this she would not do. The boom of a heavy bell striking the
hour vibrated over the roofs of the square; she supposed that it
might be the cathedral clock. In a corner of the square she saw
Gerald talking vivaciously alone with one of the two girls who had
been together. She wondered vaguely how such a girl had been
brought up, and what her parents thought--or knew! And she was
conscious of an intense pride in herself, of a measureless haughty
feeling of superiority.
Her eye caught the guillotine again, and was held by it. Guarded
by gendarmes, that tall and simple object did most menacingly
dominate the square with its crude red columns. Tools and a large
open box lay on the ground beside it. The enfeebled horse in the
waggon had an air of dozing on his twisted legs. Then the first
rays of the sun shot lengthwise across the square at the level of
the chimneys; and Sophia noticed that nearly all the lamps and
candles had been extinguished. Many people at the windows were
yawning; they laughed foolishly after they had yawned. Some were
eating and drinking. Some were shouting conversations from one
house to another. The mounted gendarmes were still pressing back
the feverish crowds that growled at all the inlets to the square.
She saw Chirac walking to and fro alone. But she could not find
Gerald. He could not have left the square. Perhaps he had returned
to the hotel and would come up to see if she was comfortable or if
she needed anything. Guiltily she sprang back into bed. When last
she had surveyed the room it had been dark; now it was bright and
every detail stood clear. Yet she had the sensation of having been
at the window only a few minutes.
She waited. But Gerald did not come. She could hear chiefly the
steady hum of the voices of the executioner and his aids. She
reflected that the room in which they were must be at the back.
The other sounds in the hotel grew less noticeable. Then, after an
age, she heard a door open, and a low voice say something
commandingly in French, and then a 'Oui, monsieur,' and a general
descent of the stairs. The executioner and his aids were leaving.
"You," cried a drunken English voice from an upper floor--it was
the middle-aged Englishman translating what the executioner had
said--"you, you will take the head." Then a rough laugh, and the
repeating voice of the Englishman's girl, still pursuing her
studies in English: "You will take ze 'ead. Yess, sair." And
another laugh. At length quiet reigned in the hotel. Sophia said
to herself: "I won't stir from this bed till it's all over and
Gerald comes back!"
She dozed, under the sheet, and was awakened by a tremendous
shrieking, growling, and yelling: a phenomenon of human bestiality
that far surpassed Sophia's narrow experiences. Shut up though she
was in a room, perfectly secure, the mad fury of that crowd,
balked at the inlets to the square, thrilled and intimidated her.
It sounded as if they would be capable of tearing the very horses
to pieces. "I must stay where I am," she murmured. And even while
saying it she rose and went to the window again and peeped out.
The torture involved was extreme, but she had not sufficient force
within her to resist the fascination. She stared greedily into the
bright square. The first thing she saw was Gerald coming out of a
house opposite, followed after a few seconds by the girl with whom
he had previously been talking. Gerald glanced hastily up at the
facade of the hotel, and then approached as near as he could to
the red columns, in front of which were now drawn a line of
gendarmes with naked swords. A second and larger waggon, with two
horses, waited by the side of the other one. The racket beyond the
square continued and even grew louder. But the couple of hundred
persons within the cordons, and all the inhabitants of the
windows, drunk and sober, gazed in a fixed and sinister
enchantment at the region of the guillotine, as Sophia gazed. "I
cannot stand this!" she told herself in horror, but she could not
move; she could not move even her eyes.
At intervals the crowd would burst out in a violent staccato--
"Le voila! Nicholas! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
And the final 'Ah' was devilish.
Then a gigantic passionate roar, the culmination of the mob's
fierce savagery, crashed against the skies. The line of maddened
horses swerved and reared, and seemed to fall on the furious
multitude while the statue-like gendarmes rocked over them. It was
a last effort to break the cordon, and it failed.
From the little street at the rear of the guillotine appeared a
priest, walking backwards, and holding a crucifix high in his
right hand, and behind him came the handsome hero, his body all
crossed with cords, between two warders, who pressed against him
and supported him on either side. He was certainly very young. He
lifted his chin gallantly, but his face was incredibly white.
Sophia discerned that the priest was trying to hide the sight of
the guillotine from the prisoner with his body, just as in the
story which she had heard at dinner.
Except the voice of the priest, indistinctly rising and falling in
the prayer for the dying, there was no sound in the square or its
environs. The windows were now occupied by groups turned to stone
with distended eyes fixed on the little procession. Sophia had a
tightening of the throat, and the hand trembled by which she held
the curtain. The central figure did not seem to her to be alive;
but rather a doll, a marionette wound up to imitate the action of
a tragedy. She saw the priest offer the crucifix to the mouth of
the marionette, which with a clumsy unhuman shoving of its corded
shoulders butted the thing away. And as the procession turned and
stopped she could plainly see that the marionette's nape and
shoulders were bare, his shirt having been slit. It was horrible.
"Why do I stay here?" she asked herself hysterically. But she did
not stir. The victim had disappeared now in the midst of a group
of men. Then she perceived him prone under the red column, between
the grooves. The silence was now broken only by the tinkling of
the horses' bits in the corners of the square. The line of
gendarmes in front of the scaffold held their swords tightly and
looked over their noses, ignoring the privileged groups that
peered almost between their shoulders.
And Sophia waited, horror-struck. She saw nothing but the gleaming
triangle of metal that was suspended high above the prone,
attendant victim. She felt like a lost soul, torn too soon from
shelter, and exposed for ever to the worst hazards of destiny. Why
was she in this strange, incomprehensible town, foreign and
inimical to her, watching with agonized glance this cruel, obscene
spectacle? Her sensibilities were all a bleeding mass of wounds.
Why? Only yesterday, and she had been, an innocent, timid creature
in Bursley, in Axe, a foolish creature who deemed the concealment
of letters a supreme excitement. Either that day or this day was
not real. Why was she imprisoned alone in that odious,
indescribably odious hotel, with no one to soothe and comfort her,
and carry her away?
The distant bell boomed once. Then a monosyllabic voice sounded,
sharp, low, nervous; she recognized the voice of the executioner,
whose name she had heard but could not remember. There was a
clicking noise.
She shrank down to the floor in terror and loathing, and hid her
face, and shuddered. Shriek after shriek, from various windows,
rang on her ears in a fusillade; and then the mad yell of the
penned crowd, which, like herself, had not seen but had heard,
extinguished all other noise. Justice was done. The great ambition
of Gerald's life was at last satisfied.
Later, amid the stir of the hotel, there came a knock at her door,
impatient and nervous. Forgetting, in her tribulation, that she
was without her bodice, she got up from the floor in a kind of
miserable dream, and opened. Chirac stood on the landing, and he
had Gerald by the arm. Chirac looked worn out, curiously fragile
and pathetic; but Gerald was the very image of death. The
attainment of ambition had utterly destroyed his equilibrium; his
curiosity had proved itself stronger than his stomach. Sophia
would have pitied him had she in that moment been capable of pity.
Gerald staggered past her into the room, and sank with a groan on
to the bed. Not long since he had been proudly conversing with
impudent women. Now, in swift collapse, he was as flaccid as a
sick hound and as disgusting as an aged drunkard.
"He is some little souffrant," said Chirac, weakly.
Sophia perceived in Chirac's tone the assumption that of course
her present duty was to devote herself to the task of restoring
her shamed husband to his manly pride.
"And what about me?" she thought bitterly.
The fat woman ascended the stairs like a tottering blancmange, and
began to gabble to Sophia, who understood nothing whatever.
"She wants sixty francs," Chirac said, and in answer to Sophia's
startled question, he explained that Gerald had agreed to pay a
hundred francs for the room, which was the landlady's own--fifty
francs in advance and the fifty after the execution. The other ten
was for the dinner. The landlady, distrusting the whole of her
clientele, was collecting her accounts instantly on the completion
of the spectacle.
Sophia made no remark as to Gerald's lie to her. Indeed, Chirac
had heard it. She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but she
was naively surprised when he practised upon herself.
"Gerald! Do you hear?" she said coldly.
The amateur of severed heads only groaned.
With a movement of irritation she went to him and felt in his
pockets for his purse; he acquiesced, still groaning. Chirac
helped her to choose and count the coins.
The fat woman, appeased, pursued her way.
"Good-bye, madame!" said Chirac, with his customary courtliness,
transforming the landing of the hideous hotel into some imperial
antechamber.
"Are you going away?" she asked, in surprise. Her distress was so
obvious that it tremendously flattered him. He would have stayed
if he could. But he had to return to Paris to write and deliver
his article.
"To-morrow, I hope!" he murmured sympathetically, kissing her
hand. The gesture atoned somewhat for the sordidness of her
situation, and even corrected the faults of her attire. Always
afterwards it seemed to her that Chirac was an old and intimate
friend; he had successfully passed through the ordeal of seeing
'the wrong side' of the stuff of her life.
She shut the door on him with a lingering glance, and reconciled
herself to her predicament.
Gerald slept. Just as he was, he slept heavily.
This was what he had brought her to, then! The horrors of the
night, of the dawn, and of the morning! Ineffable suffering and
humiliation; anguish and torture that could never be forgotten!
And after a fatuous vigil of unguessed license, he had tottered
back, an offensive beast, to sleep the day away in that filthy
chamber! He did not possess even enough spirit to play the role of
roysterer to the end. And she was bound to him; far, far from any
other human aid; cut off irrevocably by her pride from those who
perhaps would have protected her from his dangerous folly. The
deep conviction henceforward formed a permanent part of her
general consciousness that he was simply an irresponsible and
thoughtless fool! He was without sense. Such was her brilliant and
godlike husband, the man who had given her the right to call
herself a married woman! He was a fool. With all her ignorance of
the world she could see that nobody but an arrant imbecile could
have brought her to the present pass. Her native sagacity
revolted. Gusts of feeling came over her in which she could have
thrashed him into the realization of his responsibilities.
Sticking out of the breast-pocket of his soiled coat was the
packet which he had received on the previous day. If he had not
already lost it, he could only thank his luck. She took it. There
were English bank-notes in it for two hundred pounds, a letter
from a banker, and other papers. With precautions against noise
she tore the envelope and the letter and papers into small pieces,
and then looked about for a place to hide them. A cupboard
suggested itself. She got on a chair, and pushed the fragments out
of sight on the topmost shelf, where they may well be to this day.
She finished dressing, and then sewed the notes into the lining of
her skirt. She had no silly, delicate notions about stealing. She
obscurely felt that, in the care of a man like Gerald, she might
find herself in the most monstrous, the most impossible dilemmas.
Those notes, safe and secret in her skirt, gave her confidence,
reassured her against the perils of the future, and endowed her
with independence. The act was characteristic of her enterprise
and of her fundamental prudence. It approached the heroic. And her
conscience hotly defended its righteousness.
She decided that when he discovered his loss, she would merely
deny all knowledge of the envelope, for he had not spoken a word
to her about it. He never mentioned the details of money; he had a
fortune. However, the necessity for this untruth did not occur. He
made no reference whatever to his loss. The fact was, he thought
he had been careless enough to let the envelope be filched from
him during the excesses of the night.
All day till evening Sophia sat on a dirty chair, without food,
while Gerald slept. She kept repeating to herself, in amazed
resentment: "A hundred francs for this room! A hundred francs! And
he hadn't the pluck to tell me!" She could not have expressed her
contempt.
Long before sheer ennui forced her to look out of the window
again, every sign of justice had been removed from the square.
Nothing whatever remained in the heavy August sunshine save
gathered heaps of filth where the horses had reared and caracoled. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART I
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER III - AN AMBITION SATISFIED: PART III
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