________________________________________________
_ One day Madame Foucault knocked at the door of Sophia's little
room (this ceremony of knocking was one of the indications that
Sophia, convalescent, had been reinstated in her rights as an
individual), and cried:
"Madame, one is going to leave you all alone for some time."
"Come in," said Sophia, who was sitting up in an armchair, and
reading.
Madame Foucault opened the door. "One is going to leave you all
alone for some time," she repeated in a low, confidential voice,
sharply contrasting with her shriek behind the door.
Sophia nodded and smiled, and Madame Foucault also nodded and
smiled. But Madame Foucault's face quickly resumed its anxious
expression.
"The servant's brother marries himself to-day, and she implored me
to accord her two days--what would you? Madame Laurence is out.
And I must go out. It is four o'clock. I shall re-enter at six
o'clock striking. Therefore ..."
"Perfectly," Sophia concurred.
She looked curiously at Madame Foucault, who was carefully made up
and arranged for the street, in a dress of yellow tussore with
blue ornaments, bright lemon-coloured gloves, a little blue
bonnet, and a little white parasol not wider when opened than her
shoulders. Cheeks, lips, and eyes were heavily charged with rouge,
powder, or black. And that too abundant waist had been most
cunningly confined in a belt that descended beneath, instead of
rising above, the lower masses of the vast torso. The general
effect was worthy of the effort that must have gone to it. Madame
Foucault was not rejuvenated by her toilette, but it almost
procured her pardon for the crime of being over forty, fat,
creased, and worn out. It was one of those defeats that are a
triumph.
"You are very chic," said Sophia, uttering her admiration.
"Ah!" said Madame Foucault, shrugging the shoulders of
disillusion. "Chic! What does that do?"
But she was pleased.
The front-door banged. Sophia, by herself for the first time in
the flat into which she had been carried unconscious and which she
had never since left, had the disturbing sensation of being
surrounded by mysterious rooms and mysterious things. She tried to
continue reading, but the sentences conveyed nothing to her. She
rose--she could walk now a little--and looked out of the window,
through the interstices of the pattern of the lace curtains. The
window gave on the courtyard, which was about sixteen feet below
her. A low wall divided the courtyard from that of the next house.
And the windows of the two houses, only to be distinguished by the
different tints of their yellow paint, rose tier above tier in
level floors, continuing beyond Sophia's field of vision. She
pressed her face against the glass, and remembered the St. Luke's
Square of her childhood; and just as there from the showroom
window she could not even by pressing her face against the glass
see the pavement, so here she could not see the roof; the
courtyard was like the bottom of a well. There was no end to the
windows; six storeys she could count, and the sills of a seventh
were the limit of her view. Every window was heavily curtained,
like her own. Some of the upper ones had green sunblinds. Scarcely
any sound! Mysteries brooded without as well as within the flat of
Madame Foucault. Sophia saw a bodiless hand twitch at a curtain
and vanish. She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage on a sill in
the next house. A woman whom she took to be the concierge appeared
in the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a ray of
sunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of hours in the
afternoon, and disappeared again. Then she heard a piano--
somewhere. That was all. The feeling that secret and strange lives
were being lived behind those baffling windows, that humanity was
everywhere intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit yet
not quite unpleasantly. The environment softened her glance upon
the spectacle of existence, insomuch that sadness became a
voluptuous pleasure. And the environment threw her back on
herself, into a sensuous contemplation of the fundamental fact of
Sophia Scales, formerly Sophia Baines.
She turned to the room, with the marks of the bath on the floor by
the bed, and the draped piano that was never opened, and her two
trunks filling up the corner opposite the door. She had the idea
of thoroughly examining those trunks, which Chirac or somebody
else must have fetched from the hotel. At the top of one of them
was her purse, tied up with old ribbon and ostentatiously sealed!
How comical these French people were when they deemed it necessary
to be serious! She emptied both trunks, scrutinizing minutely all
her goods, and thinking of the varied occasions upon which she had
obtained them. Then she carefully restored them, her mind full of
souvenirs newly awakened.
She sighed as she straightened her back. A clock struck in another
room. It seemed to invite her towards discoveries. She had been in
no other room of the flat. She knew nothing of the rest of the
flat save by sound. For neither of the other women had ever
described it, nor had it occurred to them that Sophia might care
to leave her room though she could not leave the house.
She opened her door, and glanced along the dim corridor, with
which she was familiar. She knew that the kitchen lay next to her
little room, and that next to the kitchen came the front-door. On
the opposite side of the corridor were four double-doors. She
crossed to the pair of doors facing her own little door, and
quietly turned the handle, but the doors were locked; the same
with the next pair. The third pair yielded, and she was in a large
bedroom, with three windows on the street. She saw that the second
pair of doors, which she had failed to unfasten, also opened into
this room. Between the two pairs of doors was a wide bed. In front
of the central window was a large dressing-table. To the left of
the bed, half hiding the locked doors, was a large screen. On the
marble mantelpiece, reflected in a huge mirror, that ascended to
the ornate cornice, was a gilt-and-basalt clock, with pendants to
match. On the opposite side of the room from this was a long wide
couch. The floor was of polished oak, with a skin on either side
of the bed. At the foot of the bed was a small writing-table, with
a penny bottle of ink on it. A few coloured prints and engravings-
-representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, and
people perishing on a raft--broke the tedium of the walls. The
first impression on Sophia's eye was one of sombre splendour.
Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped,
carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness. The dark crimson bed-
hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds. The
counterpane was covered with lace. The window-curtains had
amplitude beyond the necessary, and they were suspended from
behind fringed and pleated valances. The green sofa and its sateen
cushions were stiff with applied embroidery. The chandelier
hanging from the middle of the ceiling, modelled to represent
cupids holding festoons, was a glittering confusion of gilt and
lustres; the lustres tinkled when Sophia stood on a certain part
of the floor. The cane-seated chairs were completely gilded. There
was an effect of spaciousness. And the situation of the bed
between the two double-doors, with the three windows in front and
other pairs of doors communicating with other rooms on either
hand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry.
But Sophia, with the sharp gaze of a woman brought up in the
traditions of a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation,
quickly tested and condemned the details of this chamber that
imitated every luxury. Nothing in it, she found, was 'good.' And
in St. Luke's Square 'goodness' meant honest workmanship,
permanence, the absence of pretence. All the stuffs were cheap and
showy and shabby; all the furniture was cracked, warped, or
broken. The clock showed five minutes past twelve at five o'clock.
And further, dust was everywhere, except in those places where
even the most perfunctory cleaning could not have left it. In the
obscurer pleatings of draperies it lay thick. Sophia's lip curled,
and instinctively she lifted her peignoir. One of her mother's
phrases came into her head: 'a lick and a promise.' And then
another: "If you want to leave dirt, leave it where everybody can
see it, not in the corners."
She peeped behind the screen, and all the horrible welter of a
cabinet de toilette met her gaze: a repulsive medley of foul
waters, stained vessels and cloths, brushes, sponges, powders, and
pastes. Clothes were hung up in disorder on rough nails; among
them she recognized a dressing-gown of Madame Foucault's, and,
behind affairs of later date, the dazzling scarlet cloak in which
she had first seen Madame Foucault, dilapidated now. So this was
Madame Foucault's room! This was the bower from which that
elegance emerged, the filth from which had sprung the mature
blossom!
She passed from that room direct to another, of which the shutters
were closed, leaving it in twilight. This room too was a bedroom,
rather smaller than the middle one, and having only one window,
but furnished with the same dubious opulence. Dust covered it
everywhere, and small footmarks were visible in the dust on the
floor. At the back was a small door, papered to match the wall,
and within this door was a cabinet de toilette, with no light and
no air; neither in the room nor in the closet was there any sign
of individual habitation. She traversed the main bedroom again and
found another bedroom to balance the second one, but open to the
full light of day, and in a state of extreme disorder; the double-
pillowed bed had not even been made: clothes and towels draped all
the furniture: shoes were about the floor, and on a piece of
string tied across the windows hung a single white stocking, wet.
At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as the other one, a
vile malodorous mess of appliances whose familiar forms loomed
vague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity. Sophia
turned away with the righteous disgust of one whose preparations
for the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of a
child. Concealed dirt shocked her as much as it would have shocked
her mother; and as for the trickeries of the toilet table, she
contemned them as harshly as a young saint who has never been
tempted contemns moral weakness. She thought of the strange
flaccid daily life of those two women, whose hours seemed to slip
unprofitably away without any result of achievement. She had
actually witnessed nothing; but since the beginning of her
convalescence her ears had heard, and she could piece the
evidences together. There was never any sound in the flat, outside
the kitchen, until noon. Then vague noises and smells would
commence. And about one o'clock Madame Foucault, disarrayed, would
come to inquire if the servant had attended to the needs of the
invalid. Then the odours of cookery would accentuate themselves;
bells rang; fragments of conversations escaped through doors ajar;
occasionally a man's voice or a heavy step; then the fragrance of
coffee; sometimes the sound of a kiss, the banging of the front
door, the noise of brushing, or of the shaking of a carpet, a
little scream as at some trifling domestic contretemps. Laurence,
still in a dressing-gown, would lounge into Sophia's room, dirty,
haggard, but polite with a curious stiff ceremony, and would drink
her coffee there. This wandering in peignoirs would continue till
three o'clock, and then Laurence might say, as if nerving herself
to an unusual and immense effort: "I must be dressed by five
o'clock. I have not a moment." Often Madame Foucault did not dress
at all; on such days she would go to bed immediately after dinner,
with the remark that she didn't know what was the matter with her,
but she was exhausted. And then the servant would retire to her
seventh floor, and there would be silence until, now and then,
faint creepings were heard at midnight or after. Once or twice,
through the chinks of her door, Sophia had seen a light at two
o'clock in the morning, just before the dawn.
Yet these were the women who had saved her life, who between them
had put her into a cold bath every three hours night and day for
weeks! Surely it was impossible after that to despise them for
shiftlessness and talkative idling in peignoirs; impossible to
despise them for anything whatever! But Sophia, conscious of her
inheritance of strong and resolute character, did despise them as
poor things. The one point on which she envied them was their
formal manners to her, which seemed to become more dignified and
graciously distant as her health improved. It was always 'Madame,'
'Madame,' to her, with an intonation of increasing deference. They
might have been apologizing to her for themselves.
She prowled into all the corners of the flat; but she discovered
no more rooms, nothing but a large cupboard crammed with Madame
Foucault's dresses. Then she went back to the large bedroom, and
enjoyed the busy movement and rattle of the sloping street, and
had long, vague yearnings for strength and for freedom in wide,
sane places. She decided that on the morrow she would dress
herself 'properly,' and never again wear a peignoir; the peignoir
and all that it represented, disgusted her. And while looking at
the street she ceased to see it and saw Cook's office and Chirac
helping her into the carriage. Where was he? Why had he brought
her to this impossible abode? What did he mean by such conduct?
But could he have acted otherwise? He had done the one thing that
he could do. ... Chance! ... Chance! And why an impossible abode?
Was one place more impossible than another? All this came of
running away from home with Gerald. It was remarkable that she
seldom thought of Gerald. He had vanished from her life as he had
come into it--madly, preposterously. She wondered what the next
stage in her career would be. She certainly could not forecast it.
Perhaps Gerald was starving, or in prison ... Bah! That
exclamation expressed her appalling disdain of Gerald and of the
Sophia who had once deemed him the paragon of men. Bah!
A carriage stopping in front of the house awakened her from her
meditation. Madame Foucault and a man very much younger than
Madame Foucault got out of it. Sophia fled. After all, this prying
into other people's rooms was quite inexcusable. She dropped on to
her own bed and picked up a book, in case Madame Foucault should
come in. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER V - FEVER: PART III
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER V - FEVER: PART I
Table of content of Old Wives' Tale
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
