The Pretty Lady, Arnold Bennett [popular ebook readers .txt] 📗

without moving an unnecessary muscle. She looked modestly down.

Twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans, tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some military Father Christmas on his surreptitious rounds. She knew that he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches. He was staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been. He glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice:

"Pardon me, Madam. Is this Denman Street? I want to find the Denman Hostel."

Christine looked into his face. A sacred dew suffused her from head to foot. She trembled with an intimidated joy. She felt the mystic influences of all the unseen powers. She knew herself with holy dread to be the chosen of the very clement Virgin, and the channel of a miraculous intervention. It was the most marvellous, sweetest thing that had ever happened. It was humanly incredible, but it had happened.

"Is it you?" she murmured in a soft, breaking voice.

The man stooped and examined her face.

She said, while he gazed at her: "Edgar!... See--the wrist watch," and held up her arm, from which the wide sleeve of her mantle slipped away.

And the man said: "Is it you?"

She said: "Come with me. I will look after you."

The man answered glumly:

"I have no money--at least not enough for you. And I owe you a lot of money already. You are an angel. I'm ashamed."

"What do you mean?" Christine protested. "Do you forget that you gave me a five-pound note? It was more than enough to pay the hotel.... As for the rest, let us not speak of it. Come with me."

"Did I?" muttered the man.

She could feel the very clement Virgin smiling approval of her fib; it was exactly such a fib as the Virgin herself would have told in a quandary of charity. And when a taxi came round the corner, she knew that the Virgin disguised as a taxi-driver was steering it, and she hailed it with a firm and yet loving gesture.

The taxi stopped. She opened the door, and in her sombre mantle and bright trailing frock and glinting, pale shoes she got in, and the military Father Christmas with much difficulty and jingling and clinking insinuated himself after her into the vehicle, and banged to the door. And at the same moment one of the soldiers from the Hostel ran up:

"Here, mate!... What do you want to take his money from him for, you damned w----?"

But the taxi drove off. Christine had not understood. And had she understood, she would not have cared. She had a divine mission; she was in bliss.

"You did not seem surprised to meet me," she said, taking Edgar's rough hand.

"No."

"Had you called out my name--'Christine'?"

"No."

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you were thinking of me? I was thinking of you."

"Perhaps. I don't know. But I'm never surprised."

"You must be very tired?"

"Yes."

"But why are you like that? All these things? You are not an officer now."

"No. I had to resign my commission--just after I saw you." He paused, and added drily: "Whisky." His deep rich voice filled the taxi with the resigned philosophy of fatalism.

"And then?"

"Of course I joined up again at once," he said casually. "I soon got out to the Front. Now I'm on leave. That's mere luck."

She burst into tears. She was so touched by his curt story, and by the grotesquerie of his appearance in the faint light from the exterior lamp which lit the dial of the taximeter, that she lost control of herself. And the man gave a sob, or possibly it was only a gulp to hide a sob. And she leaned against him in her thin garments. And he clinked and jingled, and his breath smelt of beer.


Chapter 25


THE RING

The flat was in darkness, except for the little lamp by the bedside. The soldier lay asleep in his flannel shirt in the wide bed, and Christine lay awake next him. His clothes were heaped on a chair. His eighty pounds' weight of kit were deposited in a corner of the drawing-room. On the table in the drawing-room were the remains of a meal. Christine was thinking, carelessly and without apprehension, of what she should say to G.J. She would tell him that she had suddenly felt unwell. No! That would be silly. She would tell him that he really had not the right to ask her to meet such women as Aida and Alice. Had he no respect for her? Or she would tell him that Aida had obviously meant to attack her, and that the dance with Lieutenant Molder was simply a device to enable her to get away quietly and avoid all scandal in a resort where scandal was intensely deprecated. She could tell him fifty things, and he would have to accept whatever she chose to tell him. She was mystically happy in the incomparable marvel of the miracle, and in her care of the dull, unresponding man. Her heart yearned thankfully, devotedly, passionately to the Virgin of the VII Dolours.

In the profound nocturnal silence broken only by the man's slow, regular breathing, she heard a sudden ring. It was the front-door bell ringing in the kitchen. The bell rang again and again obstinately. G.J.'s party was over, then, and he had arrived to make inquiries. She smiled, and did not move. After a few moments she could hear Marthe stirring. She sprang up, and then, cunningly considerate, slipped from under the bed-clothes as noiselessly and as smoothly as a snake, so that the man should not be disturbed. The two women met in the little hall, Christine in the immodesty of a lacy and diaphanous garment, and Marthe in a coarse cotton nightgown covered with a shawl. The bell rang once more, loudly, close to their ears.

"Are you mad?" Christine whispered with fierceness. "Go back to bed. Let him ring."


Chapter 26


THE RETURN

It was afternoon in April, 1916. G.J. rang the right bell at the entrance of the London home of the Lechfords. Lechford House, designed about 1840 by an Englishman of genius who in this rare instance had found a patron with the wit to let him alone, was one of the finest examples of domestic architecture in the West End. Inspired by the formidable palaces of Rome and Florence, the artist had conceived a building in the style of the Italian renaissance, but modified, softened, chastened, civilised, to express the bland and yet haughty sobriety of the English climate and the English peerage. People without an eye for the perfect would have correctly described it as a large plain house in grey stone, of three storeys, with a width of four windows on either side of its black front door, a jutting cornice, and rather elaborate chimneys. It was, however, a masterpiece for the connoisseur, and foreign architects sometimes came with cards of admission to pry into it professionally. The blinds of its principal windows were down--not because of the war; they were often down, for at least four other houses disputed with Lechford House the honour of sheltering the Marquis and his wife and their sole surviving child. Above the roof a wire platform for the catching of bombs had given the mansion a somewhat ridiculous appearance, but otherwise Lechford House managed to look as though it had never heard of the European War.

One half of the black entrance swung open, and a middle-aged gentleman dressed like Lord Lechford's stockbroker, but who was in reality his butler, said in answer to G.J.'s enquiry:

"Lady Queenie is not at home, sir."

"But it is five o'clock," protested G.J., suddenly sick of Queen's impudent unreliability. "And I have an appointment with her at five."

The butler's face relaxed ever so little from its occupational inhumanity of a suet pudding; the spirit of compassion seemed to inform it for an instant.

"Her ladyship went out about a quarter of an hour ago, sir."

"When d'you think she'll be back?"

The suet pudding was restored.

"That I could not say, sir."

"Damn the girl!" said G.J. to himself; and aloud: "Please tell her ladyship that I've called."

"Mr. Hoape, is it not, sir?"

"It is."

By the force of his raisin eyes the butler held G.J. as he turned to descend the steps.

"There's nobody at home, sir, except Mrs. Carlos Smith. Mrs. Carlos Smith is in Lady Queenie's apartments."

"Mrs. Carlos Smith!" exclaimed G.J., who had not seen Concepcion for some seventeen months; nor heard from her for nearly as long, nor heard of her since the previous year.

"Yes, sir."

"Ask her if she can see me, will you?" said G.J. impetuously, after a slight pause.

He stepped on to the tessellated pavement of the outer hall. On the raised tessellated pavement of the inner hall stood two meditative youngish footmen, possibly musing upon the problems of the intensification of the Military Service Act which were then exciting journalists and statesmen. Beyond was the renowned staircase, which, rising with insubstantial grace, lost itself in silvery altitude like the way to heaven. Presently G.J. was mounting the staircase and passing statues by Canova and Thorwaldsen, and portraits of which the heads had been painted by Lawrence and the hands and draperies by Lawrence's hireling, and huger canvasses on which the heads and breasts had been painted by Rubens and everything else by Rubens's regiment of hirelings. The guiding footman preceded him through a great chamber which he recognised as the drawing-room in its winding sheet, and then up a small and insignificant staircase; and G.J. was on ground strange to him, for never till then had he been higher than the first-floor in Lechford House.

Lady Queenie's apartments did violence to G.J.'s sensibilities as an upholder of traditionalism in all the arts, of the theory that every sound movement in any art must derive from its predecessor. Some months earlier he had met for a few minutes the creative leader of the newest development in internal decoration, and he vividly remembered a saying of the grey-haired, slouch-hatted man: "At the present day the only people in the world with really vital perceptions about decoration are African niggers, and the only inspiring productions are the coloured cotton stuffs designed for the African native market." The remark had amused and stimulated him, but he had never troubled to go in search of examples of the inspiring influence of African taste on London domesticity. He now saw perhaps the supreme instance lodged in Lechford House, like a new and truculent state within a great Empire.

Lady Queenie had imposed terms on her family, and under threats of rupture, of separation, of scandal, Lady Queenie's exotic nest had come into existence in the very fortress of unchangeable British convention. The phenomenon was a war phenomenon due to the war, begotten by the war; for Lady Queenie had said that if she was to do war-work without disaster to her sanity she must have the right environment. Thus the putting together of Lady Queenie's nest had proceeded concurrently with the building of national projectile factories and of square miles of offices for the girl clerks of ministries and departments of government.

The footman left G.J. alone in a room designated the boudoir. G.J.