Sacred and Profane Love - Arnold Bennett (digital e reader .TXT) 📗

the dog. I was horrified, but I could not remove my eyes from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird flew out; a gun sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on to the surface of the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious haste. So the game proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few birds fell into the sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof of the Casino.

'So that is pigeon-shooting,' I said coldly, turning to Frank. 'I suppose it goes on all day?'

He nodded.

'It's just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,' he said, as if apologizing for the entire male sex.

'I presume so,' I answered. 'But do you know, dear, if the idea once gets into my head that that is going on all day, I shan't be able to stop here. Let us have tea somewhere.'

Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were my emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.

We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full, but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.

'There is one advantage in travelling about with you,' said Frank.

'What is it?' I asked.

'No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most beautiful woman in the place.'

I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man's woman. I knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of being a man's woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and bracelets I felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately reward homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a cat--idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances. He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions. Later during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I said, 'No, of course not.' But he said, 'I think you would,' and ordered some. 'Admit,' he said, 'that you prefer champagne.' 'Well, of course,' I replied. But I drank very little champagne, lest I should be too happy. Frank's wonderful face grew delicately flushed. The room resounded with discreet chatter, and the tinkle of glass and silver and porcelain. The upper part of it remained in shadow, but every table was a centre of rosy light, illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in my sweet illusion I thought that every face had found the secret of joy, and that even the old had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was the sole goddess. And how satisfying then was the worship of her! Life had no inconveniences, no dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of the senses, the appeasing of appetites that instantly renewed themselves--this was the business of the soul. And as the wine sank lower in the bottles, and we cooled our tongues with ices, and the room began to empty, expectation gleamed and glittered in our eyes. At last, except a group of men smoking and talking in a corner, we were the only diners left.

'Shall we go?' Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between us.

I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not speak. I nodded.

In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and started.

'What! Vicary!' I murmured, suddenly cooled.

'I want to speak to you,' said Vicary. 'Where can we go?'

'This way,' Frank replied.

We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.

'Sit down,' said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.

He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled hair was tumbling over his hard, white face.

'What's the matter?' Frank asked. 'Anything wrong?'

'Look here, you two,' said Vicary, 'I don't want to discuss your position, and I'm the last person in this world to cast the first stone; but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to stay with my sisters, and I've come a little further. My sisters wired me they had seen you. I've been to Mentone, and driven here from there. I hoped I should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I have done, it seems.'

'Earlier than the newspapers?' Frank repeated, standing up.

'Try to keep calm,' Vicary continued. 'Your wife's body was found in the Thames at seven o'clock last night. The doctors say it had been in the water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she had gone to you. But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that you two were wandering about Europe together.'

'My wife' cried Frank.

And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word 'wife' proved to me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his wife. A fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour of the rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality of his mind. Poor fellow!

He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.

'I thank God my mother didn't live to see this!' he cried.

And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.

'My poor girl!' said Vicary, approaching me. 'What can I--I'm awfully--'

I waved him away.

'What's that?' he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.

I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.

'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.

I sprang towards him, but it was too late.


PART III


THE VICTORY

I


When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had quarrelled with Yvonne--Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years, Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over me, and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had differed violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her had appeared suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating even as she banged the door that she was at least my mistress in altercation. All day I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and ask her to return. It was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And towards evening, after seven hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue de Kleber, I yielded to it. I knew the address to which she had gone, and I took a cab and drove there, hating myself. I was received with excessive rudeness by a dirty and hag-like concierge, who, after refusing all information for some minutes, informed me at length that the young lady in question had quitted Paris in company with a gentleman.

The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few hours before finally abandoning me--all these things wounded me. But the sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must have had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she, however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived only for me....

Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me. What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank's despairing shout: 'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what it means to be broken--to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by the roots. I lived the nomad's life, in the usual European haunts of the nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely an acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry, and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to prevent me from withering--from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious, unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.

The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide, straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great, glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession, but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was as helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets of a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and forbidding. I was afraid--I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring at me. One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened on. What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my side! Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other, endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror.