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

a house in a street that appeared rather untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me, while two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to watch us. Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a five-franc-piece, and he departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I had told him to go.

I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.

Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened; and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street. And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched forward into the gloom of the archway. A laugh--the loud, unrestrained laugh of the courtesan--came from across the street.

The archway was as black as night.

'Shut the door, will you?' I heard Diaz' voice. 'I can't see it. Where are you?'

But I was not going to shut the door.

'Have you got a servant here?' I asked him.

'She comes in the mornings,' he replied.

'Then there is no one in your flat?'

'Not a shoul,' said Diaz. 'Needn't be 'fraid.'

I'm not afraid,' I said. 'But I wanted to know. Which floor is it?'

'Third. I'll light a match.'

Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in the courtyard.

Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz holding his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to time. We were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and the banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the staircase. I trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have hurried Diaz on, but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway between the second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I heard stopped at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through the banisters. The man was striking matches as I had been. 'C'est ici,' the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She put a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went out simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the staircase again. I struck another match; we struggled on.

When I had taken his key from Diaz' helpless hand, and opened his door and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a station of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.

Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a pair of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at each other.

'You had better go to bed,' I suggested. 'Take your hat off. You will feel better without it.'

He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then touched the umbrella.

'No, no, no!' he cried suddenly; 'I'm always losing this umbrella, and I won't let it out of my sight.'

'As you wish,' I replied coldly.

I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm's length, feeling a sort of icy anger.

'Go to bed,' I repeated fiercely. 'It is the only place for you.'

He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved the remark:

'You're very hard, Magda.'

Then he bent himself towards the next room.

'You will want a candle,' I said, with bitterness. 'No; I will carry it. Let me go first.'

I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless, and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel--a kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with actually a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which every large city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims. In that street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were probably a score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the blessedness of the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge might violate! I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor above floor, and serried one against another--vile, mean, squalid, cramped, unlovely, frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive with the interplay of hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the instincts that move the world might show themselves naturally and in secret. There was something tragically beautiful in that.

I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:

'It's no use. Can't do it. Can't get into bed.' I went directly to him. He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one arm out of his coat. His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled from some tremendously complicated problem.

'Put down your umbrella,' I said. 'Don't be foolish.'

'I'm not foolish,' he retorted irritably. 'Don't want to loosh thish umbrella again.'

'Well then,' I said, 'hold it in the other hand, and I will help you.'

This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted. Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed, clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left him to his inanimate companion.


II


I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was, seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful, passionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.

A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night, the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up, and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz' bedroom. As of old, he slept with the tranquillity of a child.

And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom. She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night, strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night. I sank back into my chair....

There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.

Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.

We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and she eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code for one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung skirt and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and condemned me to everlasting obloquy.

'Madame is going?' she asked coldly, holding open the door.

'No, madame,' I said. 'Are you the femme de menage of monsieur?'

'Yes, madame.'

'Monsieur is ill,' I said, deciding swiftly what to do. 'He does not wish to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o'clock.'

Long before two I should have departed.

'Monsieur knows well that I have another menage from twelve to two,' protested the woman.

'Three o'clock, then,' I said.

Bien, madame,' said she, and, producing the contents of a reticule: 'Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper, madame.'

'Thank you, madame.'

I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.

In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused me infinite trouble of spirit. 'But after all it was not so very dreadful,' I thought, as