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_ She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless
rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: "I'm
all alone now, and I'm going to be ill. I am ill." She saw herself
dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and
idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this
foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in
the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to
concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy
of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture
and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the
interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she
could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could
read the word 'Bock' on the red circlet of paper which had tossed
all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never
sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she
was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her
impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she
perceived that she must have been asleep.
"Enter," she murmured.
There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose
commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed--he seemed to
have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature
infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity--and held out to
Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.
It was Chirac's card.
"Monsieur asked for monsieur," said the waiter. "And then, as
monsieur had gone away he demanded to see madame. He says it is
very important."
Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense
of relief at this chance of speaking to some one whom she knew.
She tried to reflect rationally.
"What time is it?" she inquired.
"Eleven o'clock, madame."
This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o'clock destroyed
the remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven
o'clock, with the dawn scarcely finished?
"He says it is very important," repeated the waiter, imperturbably
and solemnly. "Will madame see him an instant?"
Between resignation and anticipation she said: "Yes."
"It is well, madame," said the waiter, disappearing without a
sound.
She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it
around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical
and spiritual. She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and
particularly in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room
except the dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven
o'clock. Moreover, she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the
whole she was pleased to see Chirac. He was almost her only
acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any
stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of Europe. Gerald
and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over the real
life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no place
for them, because they had made none. With the exception of
Chirac, whom an accident of business had thrown, into Gerald's
company years before, they had no social relations. Gerald was not
a man to make friends; he did not seem to need friends, or at any
rate to feel the want of them. But, as chance had given him
Chirac, he maintained the connection whenever they came to Paris.
Sophia, of course, had not been able to escape from the solitude
imposed by existence in hotels. Since her marriage she had never
spoken to a woman in the way of intimacy. But once or twice she
had approached intimacy with Chirac, whose wistful admiration for
her always aroused into activity her desire to charm.
Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly,
apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her
lying on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged,
and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate
the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety
seemed to deepen.
"Dear madame," he stammered, "all my excuses!" He hastened to the
bedside and kissed her hand--a little peek according to his
custom. "You are ill?"
"I have my migraine," she said. "You want Gerald?"
"Yes," he said diffidently. "He had promised----"
"He has left me," Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued
voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.
"Left you?" He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had
retired.
"Quitted me! Abandoned me! Last night!"
"Not possible!" he breathed.
She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive
persons, she could be suddenly expansive at times.
"It is serious?" he questioned.
"All that is most serious," she replied.
"And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!"
He waved his hat about.
"What is it you want, Chirac?" she demanded, in a confidential
tone.
"Eh, well," said Chirac. "You do not know where he has gone?"
"No. What do you want?" she insisted.
He was nervous. He fidgetted. She guessed that, though warm with
sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and
apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request
temporarily to leave the astonishing matter of her situation in
order to discuss the matter of his visit.
"Eh, well! He came to me yesterday afternoon in the Rue Croissant
to borrow some money."
She understood then the object of Gerald's stroll on the previous
afternoon.
"I hope you didn't lend him any," she said.
"Eh, well! It was like this. He said he ought to have received
five thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a
telegram that it would not arrive till to-day. And he had need of
five hundred francs at once. I had not five hundred francs"--he
smiled sadly, as if to insinuate that he did not handle such sums-
-"but I borrowed it from the cashbox of the journal. It is
necessary, absolutely, that I should return it this morning." He
spoke with increased seriousness. "Your husband said he would take
a cab and bring me the money immediately on the arrival of the
post this morning--about nine o'clock. Pardon me for deranging you
with such a----"
He stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to 'derange'
her, but that circumstances pressed.
"At my paper," he murmured, "it is not so easy as that to--in
fine----!"
Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied when
she thought he had lied. The nakedness of his character showed
now. Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful
supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully.
He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental
addition of endangering Chirac's reputation and situation--as a
sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness! And, further, no sooner
had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he
had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of
responsibility, no scruple. And as for common prudence--had he not
risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which
he would certainly squander in two or three days? Yes, it was
indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at nothing whatever.
"You did not know that he was coming to me?" asked Chirac, pulling
his short, silky brown beard.
"No," Sophia answered.
"But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to
me!" He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly
accepting, in his quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human
nature--reconciling himself to them at once.
Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of
Gerald's rascality.
"It is fortunate that I can pay you," she said.
"But----" he tried to protest.
"I have quite enough money."
She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from amour-
propre. She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a
man bereft of all honour. And so she clothed Gerald with the rag
of having, at any rate, not left her in destitution as well as in
sickness. Her assertion seemed a strange one, in view of the fact
that he had abandoned her on the previous evening--that is to say,
immediately after the borrowing from Chirac. But Chirac did not
examine the statement.
"Perhaps he has the intention to send me the money. Perhaps, after
all, he is now at the offices----"
"No," said Sophia. "He is gone. Will you go downstairs and wait
for me. We will go together to Cook's office. It is English money
I have."
"Cook's?" he repeated. The word now so potent had then little
significance. "But you are ill. You cannot----"
"I feel better."
She did. Or rather, she felt nothing except the power of her
resolve to remove the painful anxiety from that wistful brow. The
shame of the trick played on Chirac awakened new forces in her.
She dressed in a physical torment which, however, had no more
reality than a nightmare. She searched in a place where even an
inquisitive husband would not think of looking, and then,
painfully, she descended the long stairs, holding to the rail,
which swam round and round her, carrying the whole staircase with
it. "After all," she thought, "I can't be seriously ill, or I
shouldn't have been able to get up and go out like this. I never
guessed early this morning that I could do it! I can't possibly be
as ill as I thought I was!"
And in the vestibule she encountered Chirac's face, lightening at
the sight of her, which proved to him that his deliverance was
really to be accomplished.
"Permit me----"
"I'm all right," she smiled, tottering. "Get a cab." It suddenly
occurred to her that she might quite as easily have given him the
money in English notes; he could have changed them. But she had
not thought. Her brain would not operate. She was dreaming and
waking together.
He helped her into the cab. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART V
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER IV - A CRISIS FOR GERALD: PART III
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