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_ She languidly picked up a book, the moment Gerald had departed,
and tried to prove to herself that she was sufficiently in command
of her nerves to read. For a long time reading had been her chief
solace. But she could not read. She glanced round the inhospitable
chamber, and thought of the hundreds of rooms--some splendid and
some vile, but all arid in their unwelcoming aspect--through which
she had passed in her progress from mad exultation to calm and
cold disgust. The ceaseless din of the street annoyed her jaded
ears. And a great wave of desire for peace, peace of no matter
what kind, swept through her. And then her deep distrust of Gerald
reawakened; in spite of his seriously desperate air, which had a
quality of sincerity quite new in her experience of him, she could
not be entirely sure that, in asserting utter penury, he was not
after all merely using a trick to get rid of her.
She sprang up, threw the book on the bed, and seized her gloves.
She would follow him, if she could. She would do what she had
never done before--she would spy on him. Fighting against her
lassitude, she descended the long winding stairs, and peeped forth
from the doorway into the street. The ground floor of the hotel
was a wine-shop; the stout landlord was lightly flicking one of
the three little yellow tables that stood on the pavement. He
smiled with his customary benevolence, and silently pointed in the
direction of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. She saw Gerald down
there in the distance. He was smoking a cigar.
He seemed to be a little man without a care. The smoke of the
cigar came first round his left cheek and then round his right,
sailing away into nothing. He walked with a gay spring, but not
quickly, flourishing his cane as freely as the traffic of the
pavement would permit, glancing into all the shop windows and into
the eyes of all the women under forty. This was not at all the
same man as had a moment ago been spitting angry menaces at her in
the bedroom of the hotel. It was a fellow of blithe charm, ripe
for any adventurous joys that destiny had to offer.
Supposing he turned round and saw her?
If he turned round and saw her and asked her what she was doing
there in the street, she would tell him plainly: "I'm following
you, to find out what you do."
But he did not turn. He went straight forward, deviating at the
church, where the crowd became thicker, into the Rue du Faubourg
Montmartre, and so to the boulevard, which he crossed. The whole
city seemed excited and vivacious. Cannons boomed in slow
succession, and flags were flying. Sophia had no conception of the
significance of those guns, for, though she read a great deal, she
never read a newspaper; the idea of opening a newspaper never
occurred to her. But she was accustomed to the feverish atmosphere
of Paris. She had lately seen regiments of cavalry flashing and
prancing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and had much admired the fine
picture. She accepted the booming as another expression of the
high spirits that had to find vent somehow in this feverish
empire. She so accepted it and forgot it, using all the panorama
of the capital as a dim background for her exacerbated egoism.
She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. A
beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or
venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at
once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main
objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and
affairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to
run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in
order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Many
men thought twice about her, with her romantic Saxon mystery of
temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from
affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in
her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were
fixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid the
frothing hounds as though protected by a spell.
On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue
Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant.
Sophia stopped and asked the price of some combs which were
exposed outside a little shop. Then she went on, boldly passing
the end of the Rue Croissant. No shadow of Gerald! She saw the
signs of newspapers all along the street, Le Bien Public, La
Presse Libre, La Patrie. There was a creamery at the corner. She
entered it, asked for a cup of chocolate and sat down. She wanted
to drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her, on
account of her attacks of dizziness. Then, having ordered
chocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had need of
strength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, and
she changed the order. She was close to the door, and Gerald could
not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street.
She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the
creamery till she began to feel conspicuous there. And then Gerald
went by the door, within six feet of her. He turned the corner and
continued his descent of the Rue Montmartre. She paid for her
coffee and followed the chase. Her blood seemed to be up. Her lips
were tightened, and her thought was: "Wherever he goes, I'll go,
and I don't care what happens." She despised him. She felt herself
above him. She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had
been gradually growing more and more vile and meet to be
exterminated. She imagined infamies as to the Rue Croissant. There
was no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitude
towards him; it was merely the result of the chase. All that could
be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.
He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigar
than the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off its
collar and lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it. This
was the man who swore that he did not possess five francs.
She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him.
There were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and much
bunting, and soldiers and gesticulatory policemen. The general
effect of the street was that all things were brightly waving in
the breeze. She was caught in the crowd as in the current of a
stream, and when she tried to sidle out of it into a square, a row
of smiling policemen barred her passage; she was a part of the
traffic that they had to regulate. She drifted till the Louvre
came into view. After all, Gerald had only strolled forth to see
the sight of the day, whatever it might be! She knew not what it
was. She had no curiosity about it. In the middle of all that
thickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vast
monument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with her
characteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as a
school-teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter in
the shop. She gloated over that, as a sick appetite will gloat
over tainted food. And she saw the shop, and the curve of the
stairs up to the showroom, and the pier-glass in the showroom.
Then the guns began to boom again, and splendid carriages swept
one after another from under a majestic archway and glittered
westward down a lane of spotless splendid uniforms. The carriages
were laden with still more splendid uniforms, and with enchanting
toilets. Sophia, in her modestly stylish black, mechanically
noticed how much easier it was for attired women to sit in a
carriage now that crinolines had gone. That was the sole
impression made upon her by this glimpse of the last fete of the
Napoleonic Empire. She knew not that the supreme pillars of
imperialism were exhibiting themselves before her; and that the
eyes of those uniforms and those toilettes were full of the
legendary beauty of Eugenie, and their ears echoing to the long
phrases of Napoleon the Third about his gratitude to his people
for their confidence in him as shown by the plebiscite, and about
the ratification of constitutional reforms guaranteeing order, and
about the empire having been strengthened at its base, and about
showing force by moderation and envisaging the future without
fear, and about the bosom of peace and liberty, and the eternal
continuance of his dynasty.
She just wondered vaguely what was afoot.
When the last carriage had rolled away, and the guns and
acclamations had ceased, the crowd at length began to scatter. She
was carried by it into the Place du Palais Royal, and in a few
moments she managed to withdraw into the Rue des Bons Enfants and
was free.
The coins in her purse amounted to three sous, and therefore,
though she felt exhausted to the point of illness, she had to
return to the hotel on foot. Very slowly she crawled upwards in
the direction of the Boulevard, through the expiring gaiety of the
city. Near the Bourse a fiacre overtook her, and in the fiacre
were Gerald and a woman. Gerald had not seen her; he was talking
eagerly to his ornate companion. All his body was alive. The
fiacre was out of sight in a moment, but Sophia judged instantly
the grade of the woman, who was evidently of the discreet class
that frequented the big shops of an afternoon with something of
their own to sell.
Sophia's grimness increased. The pace of the fiacre, her fatigued
body, Gerald's delightful, careless vivacity, the attractive
streaming veil of the nice, modest courtesan--everything conspired
to increase it. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART III
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART I
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