The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories, Arnold Bennett [top novels TXT] 📗

highroad, with the wavy blue-green downs on the right, and the immense glittering flat floor of the Channel on the left. And the mere sensation of being alive almost overwhelmed them.

And further on they passed a house that stood by itself away from the road towards the cliffs. It had a sloping garden and a small greenhouse. The gate leading to the road was ajar, but the blinds of all the windows were drawn, and there was no sign of life anywhere.

"That's the house," said Edward Coe, briefly.

"I might have known it," Olive Two replied. "Olive One is certainly the worst getter-up that I ever had anything to do with, and I believe Pierre Emile isn't much better."

"Well," said Edward, "it's no absolute proof of sluggardliness not to be up and about at six forty-five of a morning, you know."

"I was forgetting how early it was!" said Olive Two, and yawned. The yawn escaped her before she was aware of it. She pulled herself together and kissed her hands mockingly, quizzically, to the house. "Good-bye, house! Good-bye, house!"

They were saved now. They could not be caught now on their surreptitious honeymoon. And their spirits went even higher.

"I thought you said Mimi would be waiting for us?" Olive Two remarked.

Edward Coe shrugged his shoulders. "Probably overslept herself! Or she may have got tired of waiting. I told her six o'clock."

On the whole Olive Two was relieved that Mimi was invisible.

"It wouldn't really matter if she _did_ split on us, would it?" said the bride.

"Not a bit," the bridegroom agreed. Now that they had safely left the house behind them, they were both very valiant. It was as if they were both saying: "Who cares?" The bridegroom's mood was entirely different from his sombre apprehensiveness of the previous evening. And the early sunshine on the dew-drops was magnificent.

But a couple of hundred yards further on, at a bend of the road, they saw a little girl shading her eyes with her hand and gazing towards the sun. She wore a short blue serge frock, and she had long restless legs, and the word _Formidable_ was on her forehead, and her eyes were all screwed up in the strong sunshine. And in her hand were flowers.

"There she is, after all!" said Edward, quickly.

Olive Two nodded. Olive Two also blushed, for Mimi was the first person acquainted with her to see her after her marriage. She blushed because she was now a married woman.

Mimi, who with much prudence had managed so that the meeting should not occur exactly in front of the house, came towards the carriage. The pony was walking up a slope. She bounded forward with her childish grace and with the awkwardness of her long legs, and her hair loose in the breeze, and she laughed nervously.

"Good morning, good morning," she cried. "Shall I jump on the step? Then the horse won't have to stop."

And she jumped lightly on to the step and giggled, still nervously, looking first at the bridegroom and then at the bride. The bridegroom held her securely by the shoulder.

"Well, Mimi," said Olive Two, whose shyness vanished in an instant before the shyness of the child. "This _is_ nice of you."

The two women kissed. But Mimi did not offer her cheek to the bridegroom. He and she simply shook hands as well as they could with a due regard for Mimi's firmness on the step.

"And who woke you up, eh?" Edward Coe demanded.

"Nobody," said Mimi; "I got up by myself, and," turning to Olive Two, "I've made this bouquet for you, auntie. There aren't any flowers in the fields. But I got the chrysanthemum out of the greenhouse, and put some bits of ferns and things round it. You must excuse it being tied up with darning wool."

She offered the bouquet diffidently, and Olive Two accepted it with a warm smile.

"Well," said Mimi, "I don't think I'd better go any further, had I?"

There was another kiss and hand-shaking, and the next moment Mimi was standing in the road and waving a little crumpled handkerchief to the receding victoria, and the bride and bridegroom were cricking their necks to respond. She waved until the carriage was out of sight, and then she stood moveless, a blue and white spot on the green landscape, with the morning sun and the sea behind her.

"Exactly like a little woman, isn't she?" said Edward Coe, enchanted by the vision.

"Exactly!" Olive Two agreed. "Nice little thing! But how tired and unwell she looks! They did well to bring her away."

"Oh!" said Edward Coe, "she probably didn't sleep well because she was afraid of oversleeping herself. She looked perfectly all right yesterday."



THE SUPREME ILLUSION

I


Perhaps it was because I was in a state of excited annoyance that I did not recognize him until he came right across the large hall of the hotel and put his hand on my shoulder.

I had arrived in Paris that afternoon, and driven to that nice, reasonable little hotel which we all know, and whose name we all give in confidence to all our friends; and there was no room in that hotel. Nor in seven other haughtily-managed hotels that I visited! A kind of archduke, who guarded the last of the seven against possible customers, deigned to inform me that the season was at its fullest, half London being as usual in Paris, and that the only central hotels where I had a chance of reception were those monstrosities the Grand and the Hotel Terminus at the Gare St Lazare. I chose the latter, and was accorded room 973 in the roof.

I thought my exasperations were over. But no! A magnificent porter within the gate had just consented to get my luggage off the cab, and was in the act of beginning to do so, when a savagely-dressed, ugly and ageing woman, followed by a maid, rushed neurotically down the steps and called him away to hold a parcel. He obeyed! At the same instant the barbaric and repulsive creature's automobile, about as large as a railway carriage, drove up and forced my frail cab down the street. I had to wait, humiliated and helpless, the taximeter of my cab industriously adding penny to penny, while that offensive hag installed herself, with the help of the maid, the porter and two page-boys, in her enormous vehicle. I should not have minded had she been young and pretty. If she had been young and pretty she would have had the right to be rude and domineering. But she was neither young nor pretty. Conceivably she had once been young; pretty she could never have been. And her eyes were hard--hard.

Hence my state of excited annoyance.

"Hullo! How goes it?" The perfect colloquial English was gently murmured at me with a French accent as the gentle hand patted my shoulder.

"Why," I said, cast violently out of a disagreeable excitement into an agreeable one, "I do believe you are Boissy Minor!"

I had not seen him for nearly twenty years, but I recognized in that soft and melancholy Jewish face, with the soft moustache and the soft beard, the wistful features of the boy of fifteen who had been my companion at an "international" school (a clever invention for inflicting exile upon patriots) with branches at Hastings, Dresden and Versailles.

Soon I was telling him, not without satisfaction, that, being a dramatic critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of _Notre Dame de la Lune_ at the Vaudeville.

And as I told him the idea occurred to me for positively the first time:

"By the way, I suppose you aren't any relation of Octave Boissy?"

I rather hoped he was; for after all, say what you like, there is a certain pleasure in feeling that you have been to school with even a relative of so tremendous a European celebrity as Octave Boissy--the man who made a million and a half francs with his second play, which was nevertheless quite a good play. All the walls of Paris were shouting his name.

"I'm the johnny himself," he replied with timidity, naively proud of his Saxon slang.

I did not give an astounded _No_! An astounded _No_! would have been rude. Still, my fear is that I failed to conceal entirely my amazement. I had to fight desperately against the natural human tendency to assume that no boy with whom one has been to school can have developed into a great man.

"Really!" I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie: "Well, I'm not surprised!" And at the same time I could hear myself saying a few days later at the office of my paper: "I met Octave Boissy in Paris. Went to school with him, you know."

"You'd forgotten my Christian name, probably," he said.

"No, I hadn't," I answered. "Your Christian name was Minor. You never had any other!" He smiled kindly. "But what on earth are you doing here?"

Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man. He even looked a very wealthy man. He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious civilization. And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal foyer of the Hotel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers and needy touts. He ought at least to have been in a very select private room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any hotel at all!

"The fact is, I'm neurasthenic," he said simply, just as if he had been saying, "The fact is, I've got a wooden leg."

"Oh!" I laughed, determined to treat him as Boissy Minor, and not as Octave Boissy.

"I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air. And yet I cannot bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it's moving. This is extremely inconvenient. _Mais que veux-tu?... Suis comme ca!_"

"_Je te plains_" I put in, so as to return his familiar and flattering "thou" immediately.

"I was strongly advised to go and stay in the country," he went on, with the same serious, wistful simplicity, "and so I ordered a special saloon carriage on the railway, so as to have as much breathing room as possible; and I ventured from my house to this station in an auto. I thought I could surely manage that. But I couldn't! I had a terrible crisis on arriving at the station, and I had to sit on a luggage-truck for four hours. I couldn't have persuaded myself to get into the saloon carriage for a fortune! I couldn't go back home in the auto! I couldn't walk! So I stepped into the hotel. I've been here ever since."

"But when was this?"

"Three months ago. My doctors say that in another six weeks I shall be sufficiently recovered to leave. It is a most distressing malady. _Mais que veux-tu?_ I have a suite in the hotel and my own servants. I walk out here into the hall because it's so large. The hotel people do the best they can, but of course--" He threw up his hands. His resigned, gentle smile was at once comic and tragic to me.

"But do you mean to say you couldn't walk out