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_ For a time there existed in the minds of both Gerald and Sophia
the remarkable notion that twelve thousand pounds represented the
infinity of wealth, that this sum possessed special magical
properties which rendered it insensible to the process of
subtraction. It seemed impossible that twelve thousand pounds,
while continually getting less, could ultimately quite disappear.
The notion lived longer in the mind of Gerald than in that of
Sophia; for Gerald would never look at a disturbing fact, whereas
Sophia's gaze was morbidly fascinated by such phenomena. In a life
devoted to travel and pleasure Gerald meant not to spend more than
six hundred a year, the interest on his fortune. Six hundred a
year is less than two pounds a day, yet Gerald never paid less
than two pounds a day in hotel bills alone. He hoped that he was
living on a thousand a year, had a secret fear that he might be
spending fifteen hundred, and was really spending about two
thousand five hundred. Still, the remarkable notion of the
inexhaustibility of twelve thousand pounds always reassured him.
The faster the money went, the more vigorously this notion
flourished in Gerald's mind. When twelve had unaccountably
dwindled to three, Gerald suddenly decided that he must act, and
in a few months he lost two thousand on the Paris Bourse. The
adventure frightened him, and in his panic he scattered a couple
of hundred in a frenzy of high living.
But even with only twenty thousand francs left out of three
hundred thousand, he held closely to the belief that natural laws
would in his case somehow be suspended. He had heard of men who
were once rich begging bread and sweeping crossings, but he felt
quite secure against such risks, by simple virtue of the axiom
that he was he. However, he meant to assist the axiom by efforts
to earn money. When these continued to fail, he tried to assist
the axiom by borrowing money; but he found that his uncle had
definitely done with him. He would have assisted the axiom by
stealing money, but he had neither the nerve nor the knowledge to
be a swindler; he was not even sufficiently expert to cheat at
cards.
He had thought in thousands. Now he began to think in hundreds, in
tens, daily and hourly. He paid two hundred francs in railway
fares in order to live economically in a village, and shortly
afterwards another two hundred francs in railway fares in order to
live economically in Paris. And to celebrate the arrival in Paris
and the definite commencement of an era of strict economy and
serious search for a livelihood, he spent a hundred francs on a
dinner at the Maison Doree and two balcony stalls at the Gymnase.
In brief, he omitted nothing--no act, no resolve, no self-
deception--of the typical fool in his situation; always convinced
that his difficulties and his wisdom were quite exceptional.
In May, 1870, on an afternoon, he was ranging nervously to and fro
in a three-cornered bedroom of a little hotel at the angle of the
Rue Fontaine and the Rue Laval (now the Rue Victor Masse), within
half a minute of the Boulevard de Clichy. It had come to that--an
exchange of the 'grand boulevard' for the 'boulevard exterieur'!
Sophia sat on a chair at the grimy window, glancing down in idle
disgust of life at the Clichy-Odeon omnibus which was casting off
its tip-horse at the corner of the Rue Chaptal. The noise of
petty, hurried traffic over the bossy paving stones was deafening.
The locality was not one to correspond with an ideal. There was
too much humanity crowded into those narrow hilly streets;
humanity seemed to be bulging out at the windows of the high
houses. Gerald healed his pride by saying that this was, after
all, the real Paris, and that the cookery was as good as could be
got anywhere, pay what you would. He seldom ate a meal in the
little salons on the first floor without becoming ecstatic upon
the cookery. To hear him, he might have chosen the hotel on its
superlative merits, without regard to expense. And with his air of
use and custom, he did indeed look like a connoisseur of Paris who
knew better than to herd with vulgar tourists in the pens of the
Madeleine quarter. He was dressed with some distinction; good
clothes, when put to the test, survive a change of fortune, as a
Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire. Only his
collar, large V-shaped front, and wristbands, which bore the
ineifaceable signs of cheap laundering, reflected the shadow of
impending disaster.
He glanced sideways, stealthily, at Sophia. She, too, was still
dressed with distinction; in the robe of black faille, the
cashmere shawl, and the little black hat with its falling veil,
there was no apparent symptom of beggary. She would have been
judged as one of those women who content themselves with few
clothes but good, and, greatly aided by nature, make a little go a
long way. Good black will last for eternity; it discloses no
secrets of modification and mending, and it is not transparent.
At last Gerald, resuming a suspended conversation, said as it were
doggedly:
"I tell you I haven't got five francs altogether! and you can feel
my pockets if you like," added the habitual liar in him, fearing
incredulity.
"Well, and what do you expect me to do?" Sophia inquired.
The accent, at once ironic and listless, in which she put this
question, showed that strange and vital things had happened to
Sophia in the four years which had elapsed since her marriage. It
did really seem to her, indeed, that the Sophia whom Gerald had
espoused was dead and gone, and that another Sophia had come into
her body: so intensely conscious was she of a fundamental change
in herself under the stress of continuous experience. And though
this was but a seeming, though she was still the same Sophia more
fully disclosed, it was a true seeming. Indisputably more
beautiful than when Gerald had unwillingly made her his legal
wife, she was now nearly twenty-four, and looked perhaps somewhat
older than her age. Her frame was firmly set, her waist thicker,
neither slim nor stout. The lips were rather hard, and she had a
habit of tightening her mouth, on the same provocation as sends a
snail into its shell. No trace was left of immature gawkiness in
her gestures or of simplicity in her intonations. She was a woman
of commanding and slightly arrogant charm, not in the least degree
the charm of innocence and ingenuousness. Her eyes were the eyes
of one who has lost her illusions too violently and too
completely. Her gaze, coldly comprehending, implied familiarity
with the abjectness of human nature. Gerald had begun and had
finished her education. He had not ruined her, as a bad professor
may ruin a fine voice, because her moral force immeasurably
exceeded his; he had unwittingly produced a masterpiece, but it
was a tragic masterpiece. Sophia was such a woman as, by a mere
glance as she utters an opinion, will make a man say to himself,
half in desire and half in alarm lest she reads him too: "By Jove!
she must have been through a thing or two. She knows what people
are!"
The marriage was, of course, a calamitous folly. From the very
first, from the moment when the commercial traveller had with
incomparable rash fatuity thrown the paper pellet over the
counter, Sophia's awakening commonsense had told her that in
yielding to her instinct she was sowing misery and shame for
herself; but she had gone on, as if under a spell. It had needed
the irretrievableness of flight from home to begin the breaking of
the trance. Once fully awakened out of the trance, she had
recognized her marriage for what it was. She had made neither the
best nor the worst of it. She had accepted Gerald as one accepts a
climate. She saw again and again that he was irreclaimably a fool
and a prodigy of irresponsibleness. She tolerated him, now with
sweetness, now bitterly; accepting always his caprices, and not
permitting herself to have wishes of her own. She was ready to pay
the price of pride and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of
self-repression. It was high, but it was the price. She had
acquired nothing but an exceptionally good knowledge of the French
language (she soon learnt to scorn Gerald's glib maltreatment of
the tongue), and she had conserved nothing but her dignity. She
knew that Gerald was sick of her, that he would have danced for
joy to be rid of her; that he was constantly unfaithful; that he
had long since ceased to be excited by her beauty. She knew also
that at bottom he was a little afraid of her; here was her sole
moral consolation. The thing that sometimes struck her as
surprising was that he had not abandoned her, simply and crudely
walked off one day and forgotten to take her with him.
They hated each other, but in different ways. She loathed him, and
he resented her.
"What do I expect you to do?" he repeated after her. "Why don't
you write home to your people and get some money out of them?"
Now that he had said what was in his mind, he faced her with a
bullying swagger. Had he been a bigger man he might have tried the
effect of physical bullying on her. One of his numerous reasons
for resenting her was that she was the taller of the two.
She made no reply.
"Now you needn't turn pale and begin all that fuss over again.
What I'm suggesting is a perfectly reasonable thing. If I haven't
got money I haven't got it. I can't invent it."
She perceived that he was ready for one of their periodical
tempestuous quarrels. But that day she felt too tired and unwell
to quarrel. His warning against a repetition of 'fuss' had
reference to the gastric dizziness from which she had been
suffering for two years. It would take her usually after a meal.
She did not swoon, but her head swam and she could not stand. She
would sink down wherever she happened to be, and, her face
alarmingly white, murmur faintly: "My salts." Within five minutes
the attack had gone and left no trace. She had been through one
just after lunch. He resented this affection. He detested being
compelled to hand the smelling-bottle to her, and he would have
avoided doing so if her pallor did not always alarm him. Nothing
but this pallor convinced him that the attacks were not a deep
ruse to impress him. His attitude invariably implied that she
could cure the malady if she chose, but that through obstinacy she
did not choose.
"Are you going to have the decency to answer my question, or
aren't you?"
"What question?" Her vibrating voice was low and restrained.
"Will you write to your people?"
"For money?"
The sarcasm of her tone was diabolic. She could not have kept the
sarcasm out of her tone; she did not attempt to keep it out. She
cared little if it whipped him to fury. Did he imagine, seriously,
that she would be capable of going on her knees to her family?
She? Was he unaware that his wife was the proudest and the most
obstinate woman on earth; that all her behaviour to him was the
expression of her pride and her obstinacy? Ill and weak though she
felt, she marshalled together all the forces of her character to
defend her resolve never, never to eat the bread of humiliation.
She was absolutely determined to be dead to her family. Certainly,
one December, several years previously, she had seen English
Christmas cards in an English shop in the Rue de Rivoli, and in a
sudden gush of tenderness towards Constance, she had despatched a
coloured greeting to Constance and her mother. And having
initiated the custom, she had continued it. That was not like
asking a kindness; it was bestowing a kindness. But except for the
annual card, she was dead to St. Luke's Square. She was one of
those daughters who disappear and are not discussed in the family
circle. The thought of her immense foolishness, the little tender
thoughts of Constance, some flitting souvenir, full of unwilling
admiration, of a regal gesture of her mother,--these things only
steeled her against any sort of resurrection after death.
And he was urging her to write home for money! Why, she would not
even have paid a visit in splendour to St. Luke's Square. Never
should they know what she had suffered! And especially her Aunt
Harriet, from whom she had stolen!
"Will you write to your people?" he demanded yet again,
emphasizing and separating each word.
"No," she said shortly, with terrible disdain.
"Why not?"
"Because I won't." The curling line of her lips, as they closed on
each other, said all the rest; all the cruel truths about his
unspeakable, inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excesses,
his lies, his deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his
improvidence, his shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers.
She doubted whether he realized his baseness and her wrongs, but
if he could not read them in her silent contumely, she was too
proud to recite them to him. She had never complained, save in
uncontrolled moments of anger.
"If that's the way you're going to talk--all right!" he snapped,
furious. Evidently he was baffled.
She kept silence. She was determined to see what he would do in
the face of her inaction.
"You know, I'm not joking," he pursued. "We shall starve."
"Very well," she agreed. "We shall starve."
She watched him surreptitiously, and she was almost sure that he
really had come to the end of his tether. His voice, which never
alone convinced, carried a sort of conviction now. He was
penniless. In four years he had squandered twelve thousand pounds,
and had nothing to show for it except an enfeebled digestion and a
tragic figure of a wife. One small point of satisfaction there
was--and all the Baines in her clutched at it and tried to suck
satisfaction from it--their manner of travelling about from hotel
to hotel had made it impossible for Gerald to run up debts. A few
debts he might have, unknown to her, but they could not be
serious.
So they looked at one another, in hatred and despair. The
inevitable had arrived. For months she had fronted it in bravado,
not concealing from herself that it lay in waiting. For years he
had been sure that though the inevitable might happen to others it
could not happen to him. There it was! He was conscious of a heavy
weight in his stomach, and she of a general numbness, enwrapping
her fatigue. Even then he could not believe that it was true, this
disaster. As for Sophia she was reconciling herself with bitter
philosophy to the eccentricities of fate. Who would have dreamed
that she, a young girl brought up, etc? Her mother could not have
improved the occasion more uncompromisingly than Sophia did--
behind that disdainful mask.
"Well--if that's it ...!" Gerald exploded at length, puffing. And
he puffed out of the room and was gone in a second. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART II
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER III - AN AMBITION SATISFIED: PART IV
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