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

Yes, with the horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the heart, you will comprehend me!

At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Cafe du Dome, with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And at one of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass in a white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted me to the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man, apparently aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and melancholy eyes. And then it was as though someone had shot me in the breast. It was as if I must fall down and die--as if the sensations which I experienced were too acute--too elemental for me to support. I have never borne a child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother may feel as I felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities of sensation. I stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on my shuddering spine, and a dew on my forehead.

'Magda!' breathed the man.

He had raised his eyes to mine.

It was Diaz, after ten years.

At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks. Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him. The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.

'It is I,' I murmured.

He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned, and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great effort at self-control, gave him an order.

'I should have known you anywhere,' said Diaz to me, taking my hand, as the waiter went.

The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness, that I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all the brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel that the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said, smiling as well as I could:

'And I you.'

'Won't you sit down here?' he suggested, avoiding my eyes.

And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at the next turning of existence.

'Then I am not much changed, you think?' he ventured, in an anxious tone.

'No,' I lied. 'You are perhaps a little stouter. That's all.'

How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.

'You are far more beautiful than ever you were,' he said, looking at me for an instant. 'You are a woman; you were a girl--then.'

The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter followed him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow liquid into the glass.

'What will you have?' Diaz asked me.

'Nothing, thank you,' I said quickly.

To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible for me to drink there.

'Ah! as you please, as you please,' Diaz snapped. 'I beg your pardon.'

'Poor fellow!' I reflected. 'He must be suffering from nervous irritability.' And aloud, 'I'm not thirsty, thank you,' as nicely as possible.

He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.

'It's awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,' he said, in a lower voice. 'I suppose you've heard about me?'

He drank half the contents of the glass.

'I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,' I replied. 'I was very sorry.'

'Yes,' he said; 'nervous breakdown--nervous breakdown.'

'You haven't been playing lately, have you?'

'It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that time! My God!'

'But surely you have tried some cure?'

'Cure!' he repeated after me. 'There's no cure. Here I am! Me!'

His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the procession of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass, which now stood on three saucers.

'You'll excuse me,' he said, sipping slowly. 'I'm not very well to-night. And you've--Why did you run away from me? I wanted to find you, but I couldn't.'

'Please do not let us talk about that,' I stopped him. 'I--I must go.'

'Oh, of course, if I've offended you--'

'No,' I said; 'I'm not at all offended. But I think--'

'Then, if you aren't offended, stop a little, and let me see you home. You're sure you won't have anything?'

I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it could not be good for his nerves.

'Been in Paris long?' he asked me, with a slightly confused utterance. 'Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.'

Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the pavement like the first one.

'Damn!' he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if in the presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in a word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: 'After all, you know, I'm the greatish pianist in the world.'

The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew back from that hot, reeking face.

'You don't think I am?' he muttered. 'You think young What's-his-name can play Ch--Chopin better than me? Is that it?'

I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal, sharing his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are people so gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest course to adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me infinite pain to write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade myself to write it in full; the details would be too repulsive. Nevertheless, forget not that I lived it.

He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I drew away.

'You are ashamed of me, madam,' he said sharply.

'I think you are not quite yourself--not quite well,' I replied.

'You mean I am drunk.'

'I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my words.'

'You mean I am drunk,' he insisted, raising his voice. 'I am not drunk; I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my heart. But you are ashamed of being seen with me.'

'I think you ought to go home,' I suggested.

'That is only to get rid of me!' he cried.

'No, no,' I appealed to him persuasively. 'Do not wound me. I will go with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be alone.'

At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for his answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was in an uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him to a public disgrace. I rose from my seat.

'You're very good,' he said, in a new voice.

The cab had stopped.

'Come!' I entreated him.

He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.

'I've forgotten somethin',' he complained. 'What is it? My umbrella--yes, my umbrella--pepin as they say here. 'Scuse me moment.'

His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with difficulty and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length arrived, helped him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay on my skirts.

'Tell the driver the address,' I whispered.

The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.

'Rue de Douai,' said Diaz sullenly.

'What number?' the driver asked.

'Does that regard you?' Diaz retorted crossly in French. 'I will tell you later.'

'Tell him now,' I pleaded.

'Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can't stand is the impudence of these fellows.'

The driver winked at me.

'Just so,' I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.

I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one's secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence. As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here, strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived will understand.

We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from his stupor.

'Where are we?' he asked.

'Just going through the Louvre,' I replied.

'I don't know how I got to the other s-side of the river,' he said. 'Don't remember. So you're coming home with me, eh? You aren't 'shamed of me?'

'You are hurting me,' I said coldly, 'with your elbow.'

'Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous' parnds, Magda! That isn't your real name, is it?'

He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous smile; but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in front. Then a swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me, and he subsided into the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him every minute.

'What shall I do with him?' I thought.

I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l'Opera and across the Grand Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe Diaz' condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab, after climbing a hill, stopped before