________________________________________________
_ In the evening, just after night had fallen, Sophia on the bed
heard the sound of raised and acrimonious voices in Madame
Foucault's room. Nothing except dinner had happened since the
arrival of Madame Foucault and the young man. These two had
evidently dined informally in the bedroom on a dish or so prepared
by Madame Foucault, who had herself served Sophia with her
invalid's repast. The odours of cookery still hung in the air.
The noise of virulent discussion increased and continued, and then
Sophia could hear sobbing, broken by short and fierce phrases from
the man. Then the door of the bedroom opened brusquely. "J'en ai
soupe!" exclaimed the man, in tones of angry disgust. "Laisse-moi,
je te prie!" And then a soft muffled sound, as of a struggle, a
quick step, and the very violent banging of the front door. After
that there was a noticeable silence, save for the regular sobbing.
Sophia wondered when it would cease, that monotonous sobbing.
"What is the matter?" she called out from her bed.
The sobbing grew louder, like the sobbing of a child who has
detected an awakening of sympathy and instinctively begins to
practise upon it. In the end Sophia arose and put on the peignoir
which she had almost determined never to wear again. The broad
corridor was lighted by a small, smelling oil-lamp with a crimson
globe. That soft, transforming radiance seemed to paint the whole
corridor with voluptuous luxury: so much so that it was impossible
to believe that the smell came from the lamp. Under the lamp lay
Madame Foucault on the floor, a shapeless mass of lace, frilled
linen, and corset; her light brown hair was loose and spread about
the floor. At the first glance, the creature abandoned to grief
made a romantic and striking picture, and Sophia thought for an
instant that she had at length encountered life on a plane that
would correspond to her dreams of romance. And she was impressed,
with a feeling somewhat akin to that of a middling commoner when
confronted with a viscount. There was, in the distance, something
imposing and sensational about that prone, trembling figure. The
tragic works of love were therein apparently manifest, in a sort
of dignified beauty. But when Sophia bent over Madame Foucault,
and touched her flabbiness, this illusion at once vanished; and
instead of being dramatically pathetic the woman was ridiculous.
Her face, especially as damaged by tears, could not support the
ordeal of inspection; it was horrible; not a picture, but a
palette; or like the coloured design of a pavement artist after a
heavy shower. Her great, relaxed eyelids alone would have rendered
any face absurd; and there were monstrous details far worse than
the eyelids. Then she was amazingly fat; her flesh seemed to be
escaping at all ends from a corset strained to the utmost limit.
And above her boots--she was still wearing dainty, high-heeled,
tightly laced boots--the calves bulged suddenly out.
As a woman of between forty and fifty, the obese sepulchre of a
dead vulgar beauty, she had no right to passions and tears and
homage, or even the means of life; she had no right to expose
herself picturesquely beneath a crimson glow in all the panoply of
ribboned garters and lacy seductiveness. It was silly; it was
disgraceful. She ought to have known that only youth and slimness
have the right to appeal to the feelings by indecent abandonments.
Such were the thoughts that mingled with the sympathy of the
beautiful and slim Sophia as she bent down to Madame Foucault. She
was sorry for her landlady, but at the same time she despised her,
and resented her woe.
"What is the matter?" she asked quietly.
"He has chucked me!" stammered Madame Foucault. "And he's the
last. I have no one now!"
She rolled over in the most grotesque manner, kicking up her legs,
with a fresh outburst of sobs. Sophia felt quite ashamed for her.
"Come and lie down. Come now!" she said, with a touch of
sharpness. "You musn't lie there like that."
Madame Foucault's behaviour was really too outrageous. Sophia
helped her, morally rather than physically, to rise, and then
persuaded her into the large bedroom. Madame Foucault fell on the
bed, of which the counterpane had been thrown over the foot.
Sophia covered the lower part of her heaving body with the
counterpane.
"Now, calm yourself, please!"
This room too was lit in crimson, by a small lamp that stood on
the night-table, and though the shade of the lamp was cracked, the
general effect of the great chamber was incontestably romantic.
Only the pillows of the wide bed and a small semi-circle of floor
were illuminated, all the rest lay in shadow. Madame Foucault's
head had dropped between the pillows. A tray containing dirty
plates and glasses and a wine-bottle was speciously picturesque on
the writing-table.
Despite her genuine gratitude to Madame Foncault for astounding
care during her illness, Sophia did not like her landlady, and the
present scene made her coldly wrathful. She saw the probability of
having another's troubles piled on the top of her own. She did
not, in her mind, actively object, because she felt that she could
not be more hopelessly miserable than she was; but she passively
resented the imposition. Her reason told her that she ought to
sympathize with this ageing, ugly, disagreeable, undignified
woman; but her heart was reluctant; her heart did not want to know
anything at all about Madame Foucault, nor to enter in any way
into her private life.
"I have not a single friend now," stammered Madame Foucault.
"Oh, yes, you have," said Sophia, cheerfully. "You have Madame
Laurence."
"Laurence--that is not a friend. You know what I mean."
"And me! I am your friend!" said Sophia, in obedience to her
conscience.
"You are very kind," replied Madame Foucault, from the pillow.
"But you know what I mean."
The fact was that Sophia did know what she meant. The terms of
their intercourse had been suddenly changed. There was no
pretentious ceremony now, but the sincerity that disaster brings.
The vast structure of make-believe, which between them they had
gradually built, had crumbled to nothing.
"I never treated badly any man in my life," whimpered Madame
Foucault. "I have always been a--good girl. There is not a man who
can say I have not been a good girl. Never was I a girl like the
rest. And every one has said so. Ah! when I tell you that once I
had a hotel in the Avenue de la Reine Hortense. Four horses ... I
have sold a horse to Madame Musard. ... You know Madame Musard.
... But one cannot make economies. Impossible to make economies!
Ah! In 'fifty-six I was spending a hundred thousand francs a year.
That cannot last. Always I have said to myself: 'That cannot
last.' Always I had the intention. ... But what would you? I
installed myself here, and borrowed money to pay for the
furniture. There did not remain to me one jewel. The men are
poltroons, all! I could let three bedrooms for three hundred and
fifty francs a month, and with serving meals and so on I could
live."
"Then that," Sophia interrupted, pointing to her own bedroom
across the corridor, "is your room?"
"Yes," said Madame Foucault. "I put you in it because at the
moment all these were let. They are so no longer. Only one--
Laurence--and she does not pay me always. What would you? Tenants-
-that does not find itself at the present hour. ... I have
nothing, and I owe. And he quits me. He chooses this moment to
quit me! And why? For nothing. For nothing. That is not for his
money that I regret him. No, no! You know, at his age--he is
twenty-five--and with a woman like me--one is not generous! No. I
loved him. And then a man is a moral support, always. I loved him.
It is at my age, mine, that one knows how to love. Beauty goes
always, but not the temperament! Ah, that--No! ... I loved him. I
love him."
Sophia's face tingled with a sudden emotion caused by the
repetition of those last three words, whose spell no usage can
mar. But she said nothing.
"Do you know what I shall become? There is nothing but that for
me. And I know of such, who are there already. A charwoman! Yes, a
charwoman! More soon or more late. Well, that is life. What would
you? One exists always." Then in a different tone: "I demand your
pardon, madame, for talking like this. I ought to have shame."
And Sophia felt that in listening she also ought to be ashamed.
But she was not ashamed. Everything seemed very natural, and even
ordinary. And, moreover, Sophia was full of the sense of her
superiority over the woman on the bed. Four years ago, in the
Restaurant Sylvain, the ingenuous and ignorant Sophia had shyly
sat in awe of the resplendent courtesan, with her haughty stare,
her large, easy gestures, and her imperturbable contempt for the
man who was paying. And now Sophia knew that she, Sophia, knew all
that was to be known about human nature. She had not merely youth,
beauty, and virtue, but knowledge--knowledge enough to reconcile
her to her own misery. She had a vigorous, clear mind, and a clean
conscience. She could look any one in the face, and judge every
one too as a woman of the world. Whereas this obscene wreck on the
bed had nothing whatever left. She had not merely lost her
effulgent beauty, she had become repulsive. She could never have
had any commonsense, nor any force of character. Her haughtiness
in the day of glory was simply fatuous, based on stupidity. She
had passed the years in idleness, trailing about all day in stuffy
rooms, and emerging at night to impress nincompoops; continually
meaning to do things which she never did, continually surprised at
the lateness of the hour, continually occupied with the most
foolish trifles. And here she was at over forty writhing about on
the bare floor because a boy of twenty-five (who MUST be a
worthless idiot) had abandoned her after a scene of ridiculous
shoutings and stampings. She was dependent on the caprices of a
young scamp, the last donkey to turn from her with loathing!
Sophia thought: "Goodness! If I had been in her place I shouldn't
have been like that. I should have been rich. I should have saved
like a miser. I wouldn't have been dependent on anybody at that
age. If I couldn't have made a better courtesan than this pitiable
woman, I would have drowned myself."
In the harsh vanity of her conscious capableness and young
strength she thought thus, half forgetting her own follies, and
half excusing them on the ground of inexperience.
Sophia wanted to go round the flat and destroy every crimson
lampshade in it. She wanted to shake Madame Foucault into self-
respect and sagacity. Moral reprehension, though present in her
mind, was only faint. Certainly she felt the immense gulf between
the honest woman and the wanton, but she did not feel it as she
would have expected to feel it. "What a fool you have been!" she
thought; not: "What a sinner!" With her precocious cynicism, which
was somewhat unsuited to the lovely northern youthfulness of that
face, she said to herself that the whole situation and their
relative attitudes would have been different if only Madame
Foucault had had the wit to amass a fortune, as (according to
Gerald) some of her rivals had succeeded in doing.
And all the time she was thinking, in another part of her mind: "I
ought not to be here. It's no use arguing. I ought not to be here.
Chirac did the only thing for me there was to do. But I must go
now."
Madame Foucault continued to recite her woes, chiefly financial,
in a weak voice damp with tears; she also continued to apologize
for mentioning herself. She had finished sobbing, and lay looking
at the wall, away from Sophia, who stood irresolute near the bed,
ashamed for her companion's weakness and incapacity.
"You must not forget," said Sophia, irritated by the unrelieved
darkness of the picture drawn by Madame Foucault, "that at least I
owe you a considerable sum, and that I am only waiting for you to
tell me how much it is. I have asked you twice already, I think."
"Oh, you are still suffering!" said Madame Foucault.
"I am quite well enough to pay my debts," said Sophia.
"I do not like to accept money from you," said Madame Foucault.
"But why not?"
"You will have the doctor to pay."
"Please do not talk in that way," said Sophia. "I have money, and
I can pay for everything, and I shall pay for everything."
She was annoyed because she was sure that Madame Foucault was only
making a pretence of delicacy, and that in any case her delicacy
was preposterous. Sophia had remarked this on the two previous
occasions when she had mentioned the subject of bills. Madame
Foucault would not treat her as an ordinary lodger, now that the
illness was past. She wanted, as it were, to complete brilliantly
what she had begun, and to live in Sophia's memory as a unique
figure of lavish philanthropy. This was a sentiment, a luxury that
she desired to offer herself: the thought that she had played
providence to a respectable married lady in distress; she
frequently hinted at Sophia's misfortunes and helplessness. But
she could not afford the luxury. She gazed at it as a poor woman
gazes at costly stuffs through the glass of a shop-window. The
truth was, she wanted the luxury for nothing. For a double reason
Sophia was exasperated: by Madame Foucault's absurd desire, and by
a natural objection to the role of a subject for philanthropy. She
would not admit that Madame Foucault's devotion as a nurse
entitled her to the satisfaction of being a philanthropist when
there was no necessity for philanthropy.
"How long have I been here?" asked Sophia.
"I don't know." murmured Madame Foucault. "Eight weeks--or is it
nine?"
"Suppose we say nine," said Sophia.
"Very well," agreed Madame Foucault, apparently reluctant.
"Now, how much must I pay you per week?"
"I don't want anything--I don't want anything! You are a friend of
Chirac's. You---"
"Not at all!" Sophia interrupted, tapping her foot and bit-ing her
lip. "Naturally I must pay."
Madame Foucault wept quietly.
"Shall I pay you seventy-five francs a week?" said Sophia, anxious
to end the matter.
"It is too much!" Madame Foucault protested, insincerely.
"What? For all you have done for me?"
"I speak not of that," Madame Foucault modestly replied.
If the devotion was not to be paid for, then seventy-five francs a
week was assuredly too much, as during more than half the time
Sophia had had almost no food. Madame Foucault was therefore
within the truth when she again protested, at sight of the bank-
notes which Sophia brought from her trunk:
"I am sure that it is too much."
"Not at all!" Sophia repeated. "Nine weeks at seventy-five. That
makes six hundred and seventy-five. Here are seven hundreds."
"I have no change," said Madame Foucault. "I have nothing."
"That will pay for the hire of the bath," said Sophia.
She laid the notes on the pillow. Madame Foucault looked at them
gluttonously, as any other person would have done in her place.
She did not touch them. After an instant she burst into wild
tears.
"But why do you cry?" Sophia asked, softened.
"I--I don't know!" spluttered Madame Foucault. "You are so
beautiful. I am so content that we saved you." Her great wet eyes
rested on Sophia.
It was sentimentality. Sophia ruthlessly set it down as
sentimentality. But she was touched. She was suddenly moved. Those
women, such as they were in their foolishness, probably had saved
her life--and she a stranger! Flaccid as they were, they had been
capable of resolute perseverance there. It was possible to say
that chance had thrown them upon an enterprise which they could
not have abandoned till they or death had won. It was possible to
say that they hoped vaguely to derive advantage from their
labours. But even then? Judged by an ordinary standard, those
women had been angels of mercy. And Sophia was despising them,
cruelly taking their motives to pieces, accusing them of
incapacity when she herself stood a supreme proof of their
capacity in, at any rate, one direction! In a rush of emotion she
saw her hardness and her injustice.
She bent down. "Never can I forget how kind you have been to me.
It is incredible! Incredible!" She spoke softly, in tones loaded
with genuine feeling. It was all she said. She could not embroider
on the theme. She had no talent for thanksgiving.
Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant
to kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips; but refrained. Her
head sank back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of
nervous sobbing. Immediately afterwards there was the sound of a
latchkey in the front-door of the flat; the bedroom door was open.
Still sobbing very violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the
bank-notes under the pillow.
Madame Laurence--as she was called: Sophia had never heard her
surname--came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with
astonishment in her dark twinkling eyes. She was usually dressed
in black, because people said that black suited her, and because
black was never out of fashion; black was an expression of her
idiosyncrasy. She showed a certain elegance, and by comparison
with the extreme disorder of Madame Foucault and the deshabille of
Sophia her appearance, all fresh from a modish restaurant, was
brilliant; it gave her an advantage over the other two--that moral
advantage which ceremonial raiment always gives.
"What is it that passes?" she demanded.
"He has chucked me, Laurence!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, in a
sort of hysteric scream which seemed to force its way through her
sobs. From the extraordinary freshness of Madame Foucault's woe,
it might have been supposed that her young man had only that
instant strode out.
Laurence and Sophia exchanged a swift glance; and Laurence, of
course, perceived that Sophia's relations with her landlady and
nurse were now of a different, a more candid order. She indicated
her perception of the change by a single slight movement of the
eyebrows.
"But listen, Aimee," she said authoritatively. "You must not let
yourself go like that. He will return."
"Never!" cried Madame Foucault. "It is finished. And he is the
last!"
Laurence, ignoring Madame Foucault, approached Sophia. "You have
an air very fatigued," she said, caressing Sophia's shoulder with
her gloved hand. "You are pale like everything. All this is not
for you. It is not reasonable to remain here, you still suffering!
At this hour! Truly not reasonable!"
Her hands persuaded Sophia towards the corridor. And, in fact,
Sophia did then notice her own exhaustion. She departed from the
room with the ready obedience of physical weakness, and shut her
door.
After about half an hour, during which she heard confused noises
and murmurings, her door half opened.
"May I enter, since you are not asleep?" It was Laurence's voice.
Twice, now, she had addressed Sophia without adding the formal
'madame.'
"Enter, I beg you," Sophia called from the bed. "I am reading."
Laurence came in. Sophia was both glad and sorry to see her. She
was eager to hear gossip which, however, she felt she ought to
despise. Moreover, she knew that if they talked that night they
would talk as friends, and that Laurence would ever afterwards
treat her with the familiarity of a friend. This she dreaded.
Still, she knew that she would yield, at any rate, to the
temptation to listen to gossip.
"I have put her to bed," said Laurence, in a whisper, as she
cautiously closed the door. "The poor woman! Oh, what a charming
bracelet! It is a true pearl, naturally?"
Her roving eye had immediately, with an infallible instinct,
caught sight of a bracelet which, in taking stock of her
possessions, Sophia had accidentally left on the piano. She picked
it up, and then put it down again.
"Yes," said Sophia. She was about to add: "It's nearly all the
jewellery I possess;" but she stopped.
Laurence moved towards Sophia's bed, and stood over it as she had
often done in her quality as nurse. She had taken off her gloves,
and she made a piquant, pretty show, with her thirty years, and
her agreeable, slightly roguish face, in which were mingled the
knowingness of a street boy and the confidence of a woman who has
ceased to be surprised at the influence of her snub nose on a
highly intelligent man.
"Did she tell you what they had quarrelled about?" Laurence
inquired abruptly. And not only the phrasing of the question, but
the assured tone in which it was uttered, showed that Laurence
meant to be the familiar of Sophia.
"Not a word!" said Sophia.
In this brief question and reply, all was crudely implied that had
previously been supposed not to exist. The relations between the
two women were altered irretrievably in a moment.
"It must have been her fault!" said Laurence. "With men she is
insupportable. I have never understood how that poor woman has
made her way. With women she is charming. But she seems to be
incapable of not treating men like dogs. Some men adore that, but
they are few. Is it not?"
Sophia smiled.
"I have told her! How many times have I told her! But it is
useless. It is stronger than she is, and if she finishes on straw
one will be able to say that it was because of that. But truly she
ought not to have asked him here! Truly that was too much! If he
knew ...!"
"Why not?" asked Sophia, awkwardly. The answer startled her.
"Because her room has not been disinfected."
"But I thought all the flat had been disinfected?"
"All except her room."
"But why not her room?"
Laurence shrugged her shoulders. "She did not want to disturb her
things! Is it that I know, I? She is like that. She takes an idea-
-and then, there you are!"
"She told me every room had been disinfected."
"She told the same to the police and the doctor."
"Then all the disinfection is useless?"
"Perfectly! But she is like that. This flat might be very
remunerative; but with her, never! She has not even paid for the
furniture--after two years!"
"But what will become of her?" Sophia asked.
"Ah--that!" Another shrug of the shoulders. "All that I know is
that it will be necessary for me to leave here. The last time I
brought Monsieur Cerf here, she was excessively rude to him. She
has doubtless told you about Monsieur Cerf?"
"No. Who is Monsieur Cerf?"
"Ah! She has not told you? That astonishes me. Monsieur Cerf, that
is my friend, you know."
"Oh!" murmured Sophia.
"Yes," Laurence proceeded, impelled by a desire to impress Sophia
and to gossip at large. "That is my friend. I knew him at the
hospital. It was to please him that I left the hospital. After
that we quarrelled for two years; but at the end he gave me right.
I did not budge. Two years! It is long. And I had left the
hospital. I could have gone back. But I would not. That is not a
life, to be nurse in a Paris hospital! No, I drew myself out as
well as I could ... He is the most charming boy you can imagine!
And rich now; that is to say, relatively. He has a cousin
infinitely more rich than he. I dined with them both to-night at
the Maison Doree. For a luxurious boy, he is a luxurious boy--the
cousin I mean. It appears that he has made a fortune in Canada."
"Truly!" said Sophia, with politeness. Laurence's hand was playing
on the edge of the bed, and Sophia observed for the first time
that it bore a wedding-ring.
"You remark my ring?" Laurence laughed. "That is he--the cousin.
'What!' he said, 'you do not wear an alliance? An alliance is more
proper. We are going to arrange that after dinner.' I said that
all the jewellers' shops would be closed. 'That is all the same to
me,' he said. 'We will open one.' And in effect ... it passed like
that. He succeeded! Is it not beautiful?" She held forth her hand.
"Yes," said Sophia. "It is very beautiful."
"Yours also is beautiful," said Laurence, with an extremely
puzzling intonation.
"It is just the ordinary English wedding-ring," said Sophia. In
spite of herself she blushed.
"Now I have married you. It is I, the cure, said he--the cousin--
when he put the ring on my finger. Oh, he is excessively amusing!
He pleases me much. And he is all alone. He asked me whether I
knew among my friends a sympathetic, pretty girl, to make four
with us three for a picnic. I said I was not sure, but I thought
not. Whom do I know? Nobody. I'm not a woman like the rest. I am
always discreet. I do not like casual relations. ... But he is
very well, the cousin. Brown eyes. ... It is an idea--will you
come, one day? He speaks English. He loves the English. He is all
that is most correct, the perfect gentleman. He would arrange a
dazzling fete. I am sure he would be enchanted to make your
acquaintance. Enchanted! ... As for my Charles, happily he is
completely mad about me--otherwise I should have fear."
She smiled, and in her smile was a genuine respect for Sophia's
face.
"I fear I cannot come," said Sophia. She honestly endeavoured to
keep out of her reply any accent of moral superiority, but she did
not quite succeed. She was not at all horrified by Laurence's
suggestion. She meant simply to refuse it; but she could not do so
in a natural voice.
"It is true you are not yet strong enough," said the imperturbable
Laurence, quickly, and with a perfect imitation of naturalness.
"But soon you must make a little promenade." She stared at her
ring. "After all, it is more proper," she observed judicially.
"With a wedding-ring one is less likely to be annoyed. What is
curious is that the idea never before came to me. Yet ..."
"You like jewellery?" said Sophia.
"If I like jewellery!" with a gesture of the hands.
"Will you pass me that bracelet?"
Laurence obeyed, and Sophia clasped it round the girl's wrist.
"Keep it," Sophia said.
"For me?" Laurence exclaimed, ravished. "It is too much."
"It is not enough," said Sophia. "And when you look at it, you
must remember how kind you were to me, and how grateful I am."
"How nicely you say that!" Laurence said ecstatically.
And Sophia felt that she had indeed said it rather nicely. This
giving of the bracelet, souvenir of one of the few capricious
follies that Gerald had committed for her and not for himself,
pleased Sophia very much.
"I am afraid your nursing of me forced you to neglect Monsieur
Cerf," she added.
"Yes, a little!" said Laurence, impartially, with a small pout of
haughtiness. "It is true that he used to complain. But I soon put
him straight. What an idea! He knows there are things upon which I
do not joke. It is not he who will quarrel a second time! Believe
me!"
Laurence's absolute conviction of her power was what impressed
Sophia. To Sophia she seemed to be a vulgar little piece of goods,
with dubious charm and a glance that was far too brazen. Her
movements were vulgar. And Sophia wondered how she had established
her empire and upon what it rested.
"I shall not show this to Aimee," whispered Laurence, indicating
the bracelet.
"As you wish," said Sophia.
"By the way, have I told you that war is declared?" Laurence
casually remarked.
"No," said Sophia. "What war?"
"The scene with Aimee made me forget it ... With Germany. The city
is quite excited. An immense crowd in front of the new Opera. They
say we shall be at Berlin in a month--or at most two months."
"Oh!" Sophia muttered. "Why is there a war?"
"Ah! It is I who asked that. Nobody knows. It is those Prussians."
"Don't you think we ought to begin again with the disinfecting?"
Sophia asked anxiously. "I must speak to Madame Foucault."
Laurence told her not to worry, and went off to show the bracelet
to Madame Foucault. She had privately decided that this was a
pleasure which, after all, she could not deny herself. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER V - FEVER: PART IV
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER V - FEVER: PART II
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