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

it almost voluptuously. The ugliness of the wallpaper, of the furniture, of everything in the room was naught. Christine's profession was naught. Who could positively say that her profession was on her face, in her gestures, in her talk? Admirable as was his knowledge of French, it was not enough to enable him to criticise her speech. Her gestures were delightful. Her face--her face was soft; her puckered brow was touching in its ingenuousness. She had a kind and a trustful eye; it was a lewd eye, indicative of her incomparable endowment; but had he not encountered the lewd eye in the very arcana of the respectability of the world outside? On the sofa, open and leaves downward, lay a book with a glistening coloured cover, entitled _Fantomas_. It was the seventh volume of an interminable romance which for years had had a tremendous vogue among the concierges, the workgirls, the clerks, and the _cocottes_ of Paris. An unreadable affair, not even indecent, which nevertheless had enchanted a whole generation. To be able to enjoy it was an absolute demonstration of lack of taste; but did not some of his best friends enjoy books no better? And could he not any day in any drawing-room see martyred books dropped open and leaves downwards in a manner to raise the gorge of a person of any bookish sensibility?

"Thou wilt play for me?" she suggested.

"But the headache?"

"It will do me good. I adore music, such music as thou playest."

He was flattered. The draped piano was close to him. Stretching out his hand he took a little pile of music from the top of it.

"But you play, then!" he exclaimed, pleased.

"No, no! I tap--only. And very little."

He glanced through the pieces of music. They were all, without exception, waltzes, by the once popular waltz-kings of Paris and Vienna, including several by the king of kings, Berger. He seated himself at the piano and opened the first waltz that came.

"Oh! I adore the waltzes of Berger," she murmured. "There is only he. You don't think so?"

He said he had never heard any of this music. Then he played every piece for her. He tried to see what it was in this music that so pleased the simple; and he saw it, or he thought he saw it. He abandoned himself to the music, yielding to it, accepting its ideals, interpreting it as though it moved him, until in the end it did produce in him a sort of factitious emotion. After all, it was no worse than much of the music he was forced to hear in very refined circles.

She said, ravished:

"You decipher music like an angel."

And hummed a fragment of the waltz from _The Rosenkavalier_ which he had played for her two evenings earlier. He glanced round sharply. Had she, then, real taste?

"It is like that, isn't it?" she questioned, and hummed it again, flattered by the look on his face.

While, at her invitation, he repeated the waltz on the piano, whose strings might have been made of zinc, he heard a ring at the outer door and then the muffled sound of a colloquy between a male voice and the voice of the Italian. "Of course," he admitted philosophically, "she has other clients already." Such a woman was bound to have other clients. He felt no jealousy, nor even discomfort, from the fact that she lent herself to any male with sufficient money and a respectable appearance. The colloquy expired.

"Ring, please," she requested, after thanking him. He hoped that she was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence. Surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness! Still, women without imagination--and the majority of women were without imagination--did do the most astounding things.

There was no immediate answer to the bell; but in a few minutes the Italian entered with a tea-tray. Christine sat up.

"I will pour the tea," said she, and to the Italian: "Marthe, where is the evening paper?" And when Marthe returned with a newspaper damp from the press, Christine said: "To Monsieur...."

Not a word of curiosity as to the unknown visitor!

G.J. was amply confirmed in his original opinion of Christine. She was one in a hundred. To provide the evening paper.... It was nothing, but it was enormous.

"Sit by my side," she said. She made just a little space for him on the sofa--barely enough so that he had to squeeze in. The afternoon tea was correct, save for the extraordinary thickness of the bread-and-butter. But G.J. said to himself that the French did not understand bread-and-butter, and the Italians still less. To compensate for the defects of the bread-and-butter there was a box of fine chocolates.

"I perfect my English," she said. Tea was finished; they were smoking, the _Evening News_ spread between them over the tea-things. She articulated with a strong French accent the words of some of the headings. "Mistair Carlos Smith keeled at the front," she read out. "Who is it, that woman there? She must be celebrated."

There was a portrait of the illustrious Concepcion, together with some sympathetic remarks about her, remarks conceived very differently from the usual semi-ironic, semi-worshipping journalistic references to the stars of Concepcion's set. G.J. answered vaguely.

"I do not like too much these society women. They are worse than us, and they cost you more. Ah! If the truth were known--" Christine spoke with a queer, restrained, surprising bitterness. Then she added, softly relenting: "However, it is sad for her.... Who was he, this monsieur?"

G.J. replied that he was nobody in particular, so far as his knowledge went.

"Ah! One of those who are husbands of their wives!" said Christine acidly.

The disturbing intuition of women!

A little later he said that he must depart.

"But why? I feel better."

"I have a committee."

"A committee?"

"It is a work of charity--for the French wounded."

"Ah! In that case.... But, beloved!"

"Yes?"

She lowered her voice.

"How dost thou call thyself?"

"Gilbert."

"Thou knowest--I have a fancy for thee."

Her tone was delicious, its sincerity absolutely convincing.

"Too amiable."

"No, no. It is true. Say! Return. Return after thy committee. Take me out to dinner--some gentle little restaurant, discreet. There must be many of them in a city like London. It is a city so romantic. Oh! The little corners of London!"

"But--of course. I should be enchanted--"

"Well, then."

He was standing. She raised her smiling, seductive face. She was young--younger than Concepcion; less battered by the world's contacts than Concepcion. She had the inexpressible virtue and power of youth. He was nearing fifty. And she, perhaps half his age, had confessed his charm.

"And say! My Gilbert. Bring me a few flowers. I have not been able to go out to-day. Something very simple. I detest that one should squander money on flowers for me."

"Seven-thirty, then!" said he. "And you will be ready?"

"I shall be very exact. Thou wilt tell me all that concerns thy committee. That interests me. The English are extraordinary."


Chapter 13


IN COMMITTEE

Within the hotel the glowing Gold Hall, whose Lincrusta Walton panels dated it, was nearly empty. Of the hundred small round tables only one was occupied; a bald head and a large green hat were almost meeting over the top of this table, but there was nothing on it except an ashtray. A waiter wandered about amid the thick plushy silence and the stagnant pools of electric light, meditating upon the curse which had befallen the world of hotels. The red lips beneath the green hat discernibly moved, but no faintest murmur therefrom reached the entrance. The hot, still place seemed to be enchanted.

The sight of the hotel flower-stall recessed on the left reminded G.J. of Christine's desire. Forty thousand skilled women had been put out of work in England because luxury was scared by the sudden vista of war, but the black-garbed girl, entrenched in her mahogany bower, was still earning some sort of a livelihood. In a moment, wakened out of her terrible boredom into an alert smile, she had sold to G.J. a bunch of expensive chrysanthemums whose yellow petals were like long curly locks. Thoughtless, he had meant to have the flowers delivered at once to Christine's flat. It would not do; it would be indiscreet. And somehow, in the absence of Braiding, it would be equally indiscreet to have them delivered at his own flat.

"I shall be leaving the hotel in about an hour; I'll take them away myself then," he said, and inquired for the headquarters of the Lechford French Hospitals Committee.

"Committee?" repeated the girl vaguely. "I expect the Onyx Hall's what you want." She pointed up a corridor, and gave change.

G.J. discovered the Onyx Hall, which had its own entrance from the street, and which in other days had been a cafe lounge. The precious pavement was now half hidden by wooden trestles, wooden cubicles, and cheap chairs. Temporary flexes brought down electric light from a stained glass dome to illuminate card-indexes and pigeon-holes and piles of letters. Notices in French and Flemish were suspended from the ornate onyx pilasters. Old countrywomen and children in rough foreign clothes, smart officers in strange uniforms, privates in shabby blue, gentlemen in morning coats and spats, and untidy Englishwomen with eyes romantic, hard, or wistful, were mixed together in the Onyx Hall, where there was no enchantment and little order, save that good French seemed to be regularly spoken on one side of the trestles and regularly assassinated on the other. G.J., mystified, caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful expression.

"And you?" she inquired perfunctorily.

He demanded, with hesitation:

"Is this the Lechford Committee?"

"The what Committee?"

"The Lechford Committee headquarters." He thought she might be rather an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party.

She gave him a sardonic look and answered, not rudely, but with large tolerance:

"Can't you read?"

By means of gesture scarcely perceptible she directed his attention to an immense linen sign stretched across the back of the big room, and he saw that he was in the ant-heap of some Belgian Committee.

"So sorry to have troubled you!" he apologised. "I suppose you don't happen to know where the Lechford Committee sits?"

"Never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. Then she smiled and he smiled. "You know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but this is the biggest by a long way. They can't let their rooms, so it costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes."

He liked the chit.

Presently, with a page-boy, he was ascending in a lift through storey after storey of silent carpeted desert. Light alternated with darkness, winking like a succession of days and nights as seen by a god. The infant showed him into a private parlour furnished and decorated in almost precisely the same taste as Christine's sitting-room, where a number of men and women sat close together at a long deal table, whose pale, classic simplicity clashed with the rest of the apartment. A thin, dark, middle-aged man of austere visage bowed to him from the head of the table. Somebody else indicated a chair, which, with a hideous, noisy scraping over the bare floor, he modestly insinuated between two occupied chairs. A third person offered a typewritten sheet containing the agenda of the meeting. A blonde girl was reading in earnest, timid