 Book 3 Chapter 4 of The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett Chapter 4 A Crisis for Gerald For a time there existed in the minds of both Gerald and Sophia the remarkable notion that twelve thousand pounds represented the infinity of wealth, that this sum possessed special magical properties which rendered it insensible to the process of subtraction. It seemed impossible that twelve thousand pounds, while continually getting less, could ultimately quite disappear. The notion lived longer in the mind of Gerald than in that of Sophia, for Gerald would never look at a disturbing fact whereas Sophia's gaze was morbidly fascinated by such phenomena. In a life devoted to travel and pleasure Gerald meant not to spend more than six hundred a year, the interest on his fortune. Six hundred a year is less than two pounds a day, yet Gerald never paid less than two pounds a day in hotel bills alone. He was hoping that he was living on a thousand a year, had a secret fear that he might be spending fifteen hundred, and was really spending about two thousand five hundred. Still, the remarkable notion of the inexhaustibility of twelve thousand pounds always reassured him. The faster the money went, the more vigorously this notion flourished in Gerald's mind. When twelve had unaccountably dwindled to three, Gerald suddenly decided that he must act, and in a few months he lost two thousand on the Paris bus. The adventure frightened him, and in his panic he scattered a couple of hundred in a frenzy of high living. But even with only twenty thousand francs left out of three hundred thousand, he held closely to the belief that natural laws would, in his case, somehow be suspended. He had heard of men who were once rich, begging bread and sweeping crossings, but he felt quite secure against such risks by simple virtue of the axiom that he was he. However, he meant to assist this axiom by efforts to earn money. When these continued to fail, he tried to assist the axiom by borrowing money, but he found that his uncle had definitely done with him. He would have assisted the axiom by stealing money, but he had neither the nerve nor the knowledge to be a swindler. He was not even sufficiently expert to cheat at cards. He had thought in thousands. Now he began to think in hundreds, in tens, daily and hourly. He paid two hundred francs in railway fares in order to live economically in a village, and shortly afterwards another two hundred francs in railway fares in order to live economically in Paris. And to celebrate the arrival in Paris, and the definite commencement of an era of strict economy and serious search for a livelihood, he spent a hundred francs on the dinner at the Maison d'Orsay, and two balcony stalls at the gymnast. In brief he omitted nothing, no act, no resolve, no self-deception of the typical fool in his situation, always convinced that his difficulties and his wisdom were quite exceptional. In May 1870, on an afternoon, he was ranging nervously to and fro in a three-cornered bedroom of a little hotel at the angle of the Rue Fontaine and the Rue Leval, now the Rue Victor Mass. Within half a minute of the Boulevard de Clichy—this had come to that—an exchange of the Grand Boulevard for the Boulevard Exterieur. Sophia sat on a chair at the grimy window, glancing down in idle disgust of life at the Clichy-Odéen omnibus which was casting off its tip-horse at the corner of the Rue Chaptal. The noise of petty, hurried traffic over the bossy paving stones was deafening. The locality was not one to correspond with an ideal. There was too much humanity crowded into those narrow, hilly streets. Humanity seemed to be bulging out at the windows of the high houses. Gerald healed his pride by saying that this was, after all, the real Paris, and that the cookery was as good as could be got anywhere. Pay what you would. He seldom ate a meal in the little salons on the first floor, without becoming ecstatic upon the cookery. To hear him, he might have chosen the hotel on its superlative merits, without regard to expense. And with his air of use and custom, he did indeed look like a connoisseur of Paris, who knew better than to herd with vulgar tourists in the pens of the Madeleine Quarter. He was dressed with some distinction. Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change of fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of a departed empire. Only his collar, large V-shaped front and wristbands, which bore ineffasible signs of cheap laundering, reflected the shadow of impending disaster. He glanced sideways, stealthily, at Sophia. She, too, was still dressed with distinction in the robe of black veil, the cashmere shawl, and the little black hat with its falling veil. There was no apparent symptom of beggary. She would have been judged as just one of those women who content themselves with few clothes, but good, and greatly aided by nature, make a little go a long way. Good black will last for eternity. It discloses no secrets of modification and mending, and it is not transparent. At last Gerald, resuming a suspended conversation, said, as it were doggedly, I tell you I haven't got five francs altogether, and you can feel my pockets, if you like. I did the habitual liar in him, feeling incredulity. Well, and what do you expect me to do? Sophia inquired. The accent, at once ironic and listless, in which she put this question, showed that strange and vital things had happened to Sophia in the four years which had elapsed since her marriage. It did really seem to her, indeed, that the Sophia whom Gerald had espoused was dead and gone, and that another Sophia had come into her body, so intensely conscious was she of a fundamental change in herself under the stress of continuous experience. And though this was but a seeming, though she was still the same Sophia, more fully disclosed, it was a true seeming. Indisputably more beautiful than when Gerald had unwillingly made her his legal wife, she was now nearly twenty-four, and looked perhaps somewhat older than her age. Her frame was firmly set, her waist thicker, neither slim nor stout, the lips were rather hard, and she had a habit of tightening her mouth on the same provocation as sends a snail into its shell. No trace was left of immature gawkiness in her gestures or of simplicity in her intonations. She was a woman of commanding and slightly arrogant charm, not in the least degree the charm of innocence and ingenuousness. Her eyes were the eyes of one who has lost her illusions too violently and too completely. Her gaze, coldly comprehending, implied familiarity with the abjectness of human nature. Gerald had begun and had finished her education. He had not ruined her, as a bad professor may ruin a fine voice, because her moral force immeasurably exceeded his. He had unwittingly produced a masterpiece, but it was a tragic masterpiece. Sophia was such a woman as, by a mere glance as she had as an opinion, will make a man say to himself, half in desire and half in alarm, lest she reads him too. By Joe, she must have been through a thing or two. She knows what people are. The marriage was, of course, a calamitous folly, from the very first, from the moment when the commercial traveller had, with incomparable rash fatuity, thrown the paper pellet over the counter. Sophia's awakening common sense had told her that in yielding to her instinct she was sowing misery and shame for herself. But she had gone on, as if under a spell. It had needed the irretrievableness of flight from home to begin the breaking of the trance. Once fully awakened out of the trance, she had recognised her marriage for what it was. She had made neither the best nor the worst of it. She had accepted Gerald as one except a climate. She saw again and again that he was irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irresponsibleness. She tolerated him, now with sweetness, now bitterly, accepting always his caprices, and never permitting herself to have wishes of her own. She was ready to pay the price of pride, and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression. It was high, but it was the price. She had acquired nothing but an exceptionally good knowledge of the French language. She soon learnt to scorn Gerald's glib maltreatment of the tongue, and she had conserved nothing but her dignity. She knew that Gerald was sick of her, that he would have danced for joy to be rid of her, that he was constantly unfaithful, that he had long since ceased to be excited by her beauty. She knew also that at bottom he was a little afraid of her. Here was her sole moral consolation. The thing that sometimes struck her as surprising was that he had not abandoned her, simply and crudely walked off one day, and forgotten to take her with him. They hated each other, but in different ways she loathed him, and he resented her. What do I expect you to do? he repeated after her. Why don't you write home to your people and get some money out of them? Now that he had said what was in his mind, he faced her with a bullying swagger. Had he been a bigger man, he might have tried the effect of physical bullying on her. One of his numerous reasons for resenting her was that she was the taller of the two. She made no reply. Now you needn't turn pale and begin all that fuss over again. What I'm suggesting is a perfectly reasonable thing. If I haven't got money, I haven't got it. I can't invent it. She perceived that he was ready for one of their periodical tempestuous quarrels. But that day she felt too tired and unwell to quarrel. His warning against a repetition of fuss had reference to the gastric dizziness from which he had been suffering for two years. It would take her usually after a meal. She did not swoon, but her head swam, and she could not stand. She would sink down wherever she happened to be, at her face alarmingly white, murmur faintly, my salts. Within five minutes the attack had gone and left no trace. She had been through one just after lunch. He resented this affliction. He detested being compelled to hand the smelling-bottle to her, and he would have avoided doing so if her pallor did not always alarm him. Nothing but this pallor convinced him that the attacks were not a deep roost to impress him. His attitude invariably implied that she could cure the malady if she chose, but that through obstinacy she did not choose. Are you going to have the decency to answer my question, or aren't you? What question? Her vibrating voice was low and restrained. Will you write to your people? For money! The sarcasm of her tone was diabolic. She could not have kept the sarcasm out of her tone. She did not attempt to keep it out. She cared little if it whipped him to fury. Did he imagine, seriously, that she would be capable of going on her knees to her family? She was he unaware that his wife was the proudest and most obstinate woman on earth, that all her behaviour to him was the expression of her pride and her obstinacy? Ill and weak though she felt, she marshaled together all the forces of her character to defend her resolve, never, never to eat the bread of humiliation. She was absolutely determined to be dead to her family. Certainly, one December, several years previously, she had seen English Christmas cards in an English shop in the Ruda Riverley, and in a sudden gush of tenderness towards Constance, she had dispatched a coloured greeting to Constance and her mother. And having initiated the custom, she had continued it. That was not like asking a kindness. It was bestowing a kindness. But except for the annual card, she was dead to St Luke's Square. She was one of those daughters who disappear and are not discussed in the family circle. The thought of her immense foolishness, the little tender thoughts of Constance, some flitting souvenir, full of unwilling admiration, of a regal gesture of her mother, these things only steeled her against any sort of resurrection after death, and he was urging her to write home for money. Why, she would not even have paid a visit in Splendour to St Luke's Square. Never should they know what she had suffered, and especially her Aunt Harriet, from whom she had stolen. Will you write to your people? he demanded, yet again, emphasising and separating each word. No, she said shortly, with terrible disdain. Why not? Because I won't. The curling line of her lips as they closed on each other said all the rest. All the cruel truths about his unspeakable, inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excessive, his lies, his deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his improvidence, his shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers. She doubted whether he realised his baseness and her wrongs, but if he could not read them in her silent contumely, she was too proud to recite them to him. She had never complained, saving uncontrolled moments of anger. If that's the way you're going to talk, all right. He snapped, furious. Evidently he was baffled. She kept silence. She was determined to see what he would do in the face of her in action. You know I'm not joking, he pursued. We shall starve. Very well, she agreed. We shall starve. She watched him surreptitiously, and she was almost sure that he really had come to the end of his tether. His voice, which never alone convinced, carried a sort of conviction now. He was penniless. In four years he had squandered twelve thousand pounds, and had nothing to show for it, except an enfeebled digestion and a tragic figure of a wife. One small point of satisfaction there was, and all the veins in her touched at it, and tried to suck satisfaction from it. Their manner of travelling about from hotel to hotel had made it impossible for Gerald to run up debts. A few debts he might have, unknown to her, but they could not be serious. So they looked at one another, in hatred and despair. The inevitable had arrived. For months she had fronted it in bravado, not concealing from herself that it lay in waiting. For years he had been sure that, though the inevitable might happen to others, it could not happen to him. There it was. He was conscious of a heavy weight in his stomach, and she of a general numbness in wrapping her fatigue. Even then he could not believe that it was true, this disaster. As for Sophia, she was reconciling herself with bitter philosophy to the eccentricities of fate. Who would have dreamed that she, a young girl brought up, etc. Her mother could not have improved the occasion more uncompromisingly than Sophia did, behind that disdainful mask. Well, if that's it, Gerald exploded at length, puffing, and he puffed out of the room and was gone in a second. Two. She languidly picked up a book the moment Gerald had departed, and tried to prove to herself that she was sufficiently in command of her nerves to read. For a long time reading had been her chief solace, but she could not read. She glanced round the inhospitable chamber, and thought of the hundreds of rooms, some splendid and some vile, but all arid in their unwelcoming aspect, through which she had passed in her progress from mad exultation to calm and cold disgust. The ceaseless din of the street annoyed her jaded ears, and a great wave of desire for peace, peace of no matter what kind, swept through her, and then her deep distrust of Gerald reawakened. In spite of his seriously desperate air, which had a quality of sincerity, quite new in her experience of him, she could not be entirely sure that, in asserting utter penury, he was not, after all, merely using a trick to get rid of her. She sprang up, threw the book on the bed, and seized her gloves. She would follow him, if she could. She would do what she had never done before. She would spy on him. Fighting against her lassitude, she descended the long winding stairs, and peep forth from the doorway into the street. The ground floor of the hotel was a wine-shop. The stout landlord was lightly flicking one of his three little yellow tables that stood on the pavement. He smiled with his customary benevolence, and silently pointed in the direction of the ruin of Rodin de Loret. She saw Gerald down there in the distance. He was smoking a cigar. He seemed to be a little man without a care. The smoke of the cigar came first round his left cheek, and then round his right, sailing away into nothing. He walked with a gay spring, but not quickly, flourishing his cane as freely as the traffic of the pavement would permit, glancing into all the shop windows, and into the eyes of all the women under forty. This was not at all the same man as had a moment ago been spitting angry menaces at her in the bedroom of the hotel. It was a fellow of Blythe charm, ripe for any adventurous joys that Destiny had to offer. Supposing he turned round and saw her. If he turned round and saw her, and asked her what she was doing there in the street, she would tell him plainly, I'm following you to find out what you do. But he did not turn. He went straight forward, deviating at the church where the crowd became thicker into the rue du Fourberg-Montmartre, and so to the boulevard which he crossed. The whole city seemed excited and vivacious. Canons boomed in slow succession, and flags were flying. Sophia had no conception of the significance of those guns, for though she read a great deal, she never read a newspaper. The idea of opening a newspaper never occurred to her. But she was accustomed to the feverish atmosphere of Paris. She had lately seen regiments of cavalry flashing and prancing in the Luxembourg gardens, and had much admired the fine picture. She accepted the booming as another expression of the high spirit that had to find vent somehow in this feverish empire. She so accepted it and forgot it, using all the panorama of the capital as a dim background for her exacerbated egoism. She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly, a beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable who walks slowly in the streets of Paris, becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Many men thought twice about her, with her romantic saxon mystery of temperament and her Parisian clothes. But all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those wrapped eyes were fixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell. On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant. So far stopped, and asked the price of some combs which were exposed outside a little shop. Then she went on, boldly passing the end of the Rue Croissant. No shadow of Gerald. She saw the signs of newspapers all along the street, le bien public, la presse libre, la patrie. There was a creamery at the corner. She entered it, and asked for a cup of chocolate, and sat down. She wanted to drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her on account of her attacks of dizziness. Then, having ordered chocolate, she felt that on this occasion, when she had need of strength and her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, and she changed the order. She was close to the door, and Gerald could not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street. She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the creamery till she began to feel conspicuous there. And then Gerald went by the door within six feet of her. He turned the corner, and continued his descent of the Rue Montmartre. She paid for her coffee, and followed the chase. Her blood seemed to be up, her lips were tightened, and her thought was, wherever he goes I'll go, and I don't care what happens. She despised him. She felt herself above him. She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had been gradually growing more and more vile and meat to be exterminated. She imagined infamy as to the Rue Croissant. There was no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitude towards him. It was merely the result of the chase. All that could be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar. He stepped into a tobacco shop, and came out with a longer cigar than the first one, a more expensive article. Stripped off its collar and lighted it, as a millionaire might have lighted it. This was the man who swalled that he did not possess five francs. She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him. There were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and much bunting, and soldiers, and gesticulatory policemen. The general effect of the street was that all things were brightly waving in the breeze. She was caught in the crowd as in the current of a stream, and when she tried to sidle out of it into a square, a row of smiling policemen barred her passage. She was part of the traffic that they had to regulate. She drifted till the Louvre came into view. After all, Gerald had only strolled forth to see the sight of the day, whatever it might be. She knew not what it was. She had no curiosity about it. In the middle of all that thickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vast monument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with her characteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as a school teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter in the shop. She gloated over that, as a sick appetite will gloat over tainted food, and she saw the shop and the curve of the stairs up to the showroom, and the pier glass in the showroom. Then the guns began to boom again, and splendid carriages swept one after another from under a majestic archway, and glittered westward down a lane of spotless, splendid uniforms. The carriages were laden with still more splendid uniforms, and with enchanting toilets. Sophia, in her modestly stylish black, mechanically noticed how much easier it was for a tired woman to sit in a carriage now that crinolines had gone. That was the sole impression made upon her by this glimpse of the last fate of the Napoleonic Empire. She knew not that the supreme pillars of imperialism were exhibiting themselves before her, and that the eyes of those uniforms and those toilets were full of the legendary beauties of Eugenie, and their ears echoing to the long phrases of Napoleon III about his gratitude to his people, for their confidence in him as shown by the plebiscite, and about the ratification of constitutional reforms guaranteeing order, and about the empire having been strengthened at its base, and about showing force by moderation, and envisaging the future without fear, and about the bosom of peace and liberty, and the eternal continuance of his dynasty. She just wondered vaguely what was afoot. When the last carriage had rolled away, and the guns and acclimations had ceased, the crowd at length began to scatter. She was carried by it into the place du Palais royal, and in a few moments she managed to withdraw into the rue des bonnes enfants, and was free. The coins and her purse amounted to three souses, and therefore, though she felt exhausted to the point of illness, she had to return to the hotel on foot. Very slowly she crawled upwards in the direction of the boulevard, through the expiring garety of the city. Near the bus a fiacca overtook her, and in the fiacca were Gerald and a woman. Gerald had not seen her. He was talking eagerly to his ornate companion. All his body was alive. The fiacca was out of sight in a moment, that Sophia judged instantly the grade of the woman, who was evidently of the discrete class that frequented the big shops of an afternoon with something of their own to sell. Sophia's grimness increased. The pace of the fiacca, her fatigued body, Gerald's delightful, careless vivacity, the attractive streaming veil of the nice, modest courtesan. Everything conspired to increase it. Three. Gerald returned to the bedroom which contained his wife and all else that he owned in the world, at about nine o'clock that evening. Sophia was in bed. She had been driven to bed by weariness. She would have preferred to sit up to receive her husband, even if it had meant sitting up all night, but her body was too heavy for her spirit. She lay in the dark. She had eaten nothing. Gerald came straight into the room. He struck a match, which burned blue with a stench for several seconds, and then go clear yellow flame. He lit a candle and saw his wife. Oh! he said, you're there, are you? She offered no reply. Won't speak, eh? he said, a griable sort of wife. Well, have you made up your mind to do as I told you? I've come back especially to know. She still did not speak. He sat down with his hat on and stuck out his feet, wagging them to and fro on the heels. I'm quite without money, he went on, and I'm sure your people will be glad to lend us a bit till I get some, especially as it's a question of you starving as well as me. If I had enough to pay your fares to Bursley, I'd pack you off. But I haven't. She could only hear his exasperating voice. The end of the bed was between her eyes and his. Liar! she said, with uncompromising distinctness. The word reached him, barbed, with all the poison of her contempt and disgust. There was a pause. Oh! I'm a liar, am I? Thanks! I lied enough to get you, I'll admit, but you never complained of that. I remember beginning the New Year well with a thumping lie just to have a sight of you, my vixen, but you didn't complain then. I took you with only the clothes on your back, and I've spent every cent I had on you, and now I'm spun, you call me a liar. She said nothing. However, he went on. This is going to come to an end, this is. He rose, changed the position of the candle, putting it on a chest of drawers, and then drew his trunk from the wall and knelt in front of it. She gathered that he was packing his clothes. At first she did not comprehend his reference to beginning the New Year. Then his meaning revealed itself, that story to her mother about having been attacked by Ruffians at the bottom of King Street had been an invention. Her ruse to account plausibly for his presence on her mother's doorstep, and she had never suspected that the story was not true. In spite of her experience of his lying she had never suspected that that particular statement was a lie. What a simpleton she was! There was a continual movement in the room for about a quarter of an hour. Then a key turned in the lock of the trunk. His head popped up over the foot of the bed. This isn't a joke, you know, he said. She kept silence. I give you one more chance. Will you write to your mother, or Constance, if you like, or won't you? She scorned to reply in any way. I'm your husband, he said, and it's your duty to obey me, particularly in an affair like this. I order you to write to your mother." The corners of her lips turned downwards. Angered by her mute obstinacy, he broke away from the bed with a sudden gesture. You do as you like, he cried, putting on his overcoat. And I shall do as I like. You can't say I haven't warned you. It's your own deliberate choice, mind you. Whatever happens to you, you brought it on yourself. She would not speak a word, not even to insist that she was indisposed. He pushed his trunk outside the door and returned to the bed. You understand? he said menacingly. I'm off. She looked up at the foul ceiling. Hmm! he sniffed, bringing his reserves of pride to combat the persistent silence that was damaging his dignity. And he went off, sticking his head forward like a pugilist. Here, she muttered, you're forgetting this. He turned. She stretched her hand to the night-table, and held up a red circlet. What is it? It's the bit of paper off the cigar you bought in the room on March this afternoon, she answered in a significant tone. He hesitated, then swore violently and bounced out of the room. He had made her suffer, but she was almost repaid for everything by that moment of cruel triumph. She exalted in it, and never forgot it. Five minutes later, the gloomy menial infelt slippers and alpaca-jacket, who seemed to pass the whole of his life, flitting in and out of bedrooms, like a rabbit in a warren, carried Gerald's trunk downstairs. She recognized the peculiar trade of his slippers. Then there was a knock at the door. The landlady entered, actuated by a legitimate curiosity. Madame is suffering, the landlady began. Sophia refused offers of food and nursing. Madame knows without doubt that Monsieur has gone away. Has he paid the bill? Sophia asked, bluntly. But yes, Madame, till to-morrow. Then Madame, has want of nothing? If you will extinguish the candle, said Sophia. He had deserted her, then. All this, she reflected, listening in the dark to the ceaseless rattle of the street, because Mother and Constance wanted to see the elephant, and I had to go into Father's room. I should never have caught sight of him from the drawing-room window. Four. She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself, I'm all alone now, and I'm going to be ill. I am ill. She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which, when it came, increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the interminable deleteriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window, to the moment when she could read the word, but, on the red circle of paper, which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep. And then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep. Enter, she murmured. There entered the menial in Alpaca. His wax and face showed a morose commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed. He seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity, and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand. It was Shirak's card. The Monsieur asked for Monsieur, said the waiter, and then, as Monsieur had gone away, he demanded to see Madame. He says it is very important. Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of relief at this chance of speaking to someone whom she knew. She tried to reflect rationally. What time is it? She inquired. Eleven o'clock, Madame. This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o'clock destroyed the remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven o'clock, with the dawn scarcely finished? He says it is very important, repeated the waiter, imperturbably and solemnly. Will Madame see him an instant? Between resignation and anticipation, she said, Yes. It is well, Madame, said the waiter, disappearing without a sound. She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical and spiritual. She hated to receive Shirak in a bedroom, and particularly in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room except the dining room, which began to be occupied after eleven o'clock. Moreover, she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see Shirak. He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend in the whole of Europe. Gerald and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over the real life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no place for them, because they had made none, with the exception of Shirak, whom an accident of business had thrown into Gerald's company years before. They had no social relations. Gerald was not a man to make friends. He did not seem to need friends, or at any rate to feel the want of them. But as chance had given him Shirak, he maintained the connection whenever they came to Paris. Sophia, of course, had not been able to escape from the solitude imposed by existence in hotels. Since her marriage she had never spoken to a woman in the way of intimacy, but once or twice she had approached intimacy with Shirak, whose wistful admiration for her always aroused into activity, her desire to charm. Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly, apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety, and as he saw her lying on her back with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen. Dear Madame! he stammered, all my excuses. He hastened to the bedside and kissed her hand, a little peek according to his custom. You're ill? I have my migraine, she said. You want Gerald? Yes, he said diffidently. He had promised. He has left me. Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the word. Left you? He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired. Quitted me. Abandoned me. Last night. Not possible, he breathed. She nodded. She felt intimate with him, like all secretive persons. She could be suddenly expansive at times. It is serious, he questioned. All that is most serious, she replied. And you ill? Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example, he waved his hat about. What is it you want, Chirac? she demanded in a confidential tone. Eh, well, said Chirac, you do not know where he has gone? No. What do you want? He was nervous. He fidgeted. She guessed that, though warm with sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request, temporarily to leave the astonishing matter of her situation, in order to discuss the matter of his visit. Eh, well, he came to me yesterday afternoon, in the roux croissant, to borrow some money. She understood, then, the object of Gerald's stroll on the previous afternoon. I hope you did not lend him any, she said. Eh, well, it was like this. He said he ought to have received five thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a telegram that he would not arrive until today. And he had need of five hundred francs at once. I had not five hundred francs. He smiled, sadly, as if to insinuate that he did not handle such sums, but I borrowed it from the cash-box of the journal. It is necessary, absolutely, that I should return it this morning. He spoke with increased seriousness. Your husband said he would take a cab and bring me the money immediately on the arrival of the post this morning, about nine o'clock. Pardon me for deranging you with such a— he stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to derange her, but the circumstance is pressed. At my paper, he murmured, it is not so easy as that to—in fine— Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied, when she thought he had lied, the nakedness of his character showed now. Instantly, upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully. He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of endangering Chirac's reputation and situation, as a sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness. And further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple, and as for common prudence, had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days. Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing—at nothing whatever. You did not know he was coming to me? asked Chirac, pulling his short silky brown beard. No, Sophia answered, but he said that you had charged him with your friendliness to me. He nodded his head once or twice, sadly, but candidly accepting, in the quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature, reconciling himself to them at once. Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of Gerald's rascality. It is fortunate that I can pay you, she said, but he tried to protest. I have quite enough money. She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from ammo or prompt. She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a man bereft of all honour. And so she clothed Gerald with the rag of having, at any rate, not left her in destitution as well as in sickness. Her assertion seemed a strange one, in view of the fact that he had abandoned her on the previous evening. That is to say, immediately after the borrowing from Chirac. But Chirac did not examine the statement. Perhaps he has the intention to send me the money. Perhaps, after all, he is now at the offices. No, said Sophia, he is gone. Will you go downstairs and wait for me? We will go together to Cook's office. It is English money I have. Cook's, he repeated. The word, now so potent, had then little significance. But you are ill, you cannot. I feel better. She did. Or rather she felt nothing except the power of her resolve to remove the painful anxiety from that wistful brow. The shame of the trick played on Chirac awakened new forces in her. She dressed in a physical torment which, however, had no more reality than a nightmare. She searched in a place which even an inquisitive husband would not think of looking, and then, painfully, she descended the long stairs, holding to the rail which swam round and round her, carrying the whole staircase with it. After all, she thought I can't be seriously ill, or I shouldn't have been able to get up and go out like this. I never guessed early this morning that I could do it. I can't possibly be as ill as I thought I was. And in the vestibule she encountered Chirac's face, lightening at the sight of her, which proved to him that his deliverance was really to be accomplished. Ah, permit me. It's all right, she smiled, tottering, get a cab. It suddenly occurred to her that she might as easily have given him the money in English notes. He could have changed them. But she had not thought her brain would not operate. She was dreaming and waking together. He helped her into the cab. In the Bureau de Champs there was a little knot of English people, with naive, romantic and honest faces, quite different from the faces outside in the street, no corruption in those faces, but a sort of wandering and infantile sincerity, rather out of its element, and lost in a land too unsophisticated, seeming to belong to an earlier age. Sophia liked their tourists' stare and their plain and ugly clothes. She longed to be back in England, longed for a moment with violence, drowning in that desire. The English clerk behind his brass bars took her notes, and carefully examined them one by one. She watched him, not entirely convinced of his reality, and thought vaguely of the detestable morning when she had abstracted the notes from Gerald's pocket. She was filled with pity for the simple, ignorant Sophia of those days. The Sophia who still had a few ridiculous illusions concerning Gerald's character. Often since she had been tempted to break into the money, but she had always withstood the temptation, saying to herself that an hour of more urgent need would come. It had come. She was proud of her firmness, of the force of will which had enabled her to reserve the fund intact. The clerk gave her a keen look, and then asked her how she would take the French money, and she saw the notes falling down one after another on the counter, as the clerk separated them with a snapping sound of the paper. Chirac was beside her. Does that make the count? She said, having pushed towards him five hundred frank notes. I should not know how to thank you, he said, accepting the notes. Truly his joy was unmistakably eager. He had had a shock and a fright, and he now saw the danger past. He could return to the cashier of his newspaper, and fling down the money with the lordly and careless air, as if to say, when it is a question of these English, one could always be sure. But first he would escort her to the hotel. She declined. She did not know why, for he was her sole point of moral support in all France. He insisted. She yielded. So she turned her back with regret on that little English oasis in the Sahara of Paris, and staggered to the Fiatka. And now that she had done what she had to do, she lost control of her body, and reclined flaccid and inert. Chirac was evidently alarmed. He did not speak, but glanced at her from time to time with eyes full of fear. The carriage appeared to her to be swimming amid waves over great depths. Then she was aware of a heavy weight against her shoulder. She had slipped down upon Chirac, unconscious. End of Book 3, Chapter 4. Book 3, Chapter 5, Part 1 of The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett Book 3, Sophia Chapter 5, Part 1, Fever 1 Then she was lying in bed in a small room, obscure because it was heavily curtained. The light came through the inner pair of curtains of a crew lace, with a beautiful soft silver equality. A man was standing by the side of the bed, not Chirac. And now, madame, he said to her, with kind firmness, and speaking with a charming exaggerated purity of the vows, you have the mucus fever. I have had it myself. You will be forced to take baths. Very frequently I must ask you to reconcile yourself to that, to be good. She did not reply. It did not occur to her to reply. But she certainly thought that this doctor—he was probably a doctor—was overestimating her case. She felt better than she had felt for two days. Still she did not desire to move, nor was she in the least anxious as to her surroundings. She lay quiet. A woman, in a rather coquettish deserbie, watched over her with expert skill. Later Sophia seemed to be revisiting the sea on whose waves the cab had swum, but now she was under the sea, in a watery gulf terribly deep, and the sounds of the world came to her through the water, sudden and strange. Hans seized her, and forced her from the sub-aqueous grotto where she had hidden, into new alarms, and she briefly perceived that there was a large bath by the side of the bed, and that she was being pushed into it. The water was icy cold. After that her outlook upon things was for a time clearer and more precise. She knew from fragments of talk which she heard that she was put into the cold bath by her bed every three hours, night and day, and that she remained in it for ten minutes. Always, before the bath, she had to drink a glass of wine, and sometimes another glass while she was in the bath. Beyond this wine, and occasionally a cup of soup, she took nothing. I had no wish to take anything. She grew perfectly accustomed to these extraordinary habits of life, to this merging of night and day into one monotonous and endless repetition of the same right amid the same circumstances on exactly the same spot. Then followed a period during which she objected to being constantly wakened up for this annoying immersion, and she fought against it even in her dreams. Long days seemed to pass when she could not be sure whether she had been put into the bath or not, when all external phenomena were disconcertingly interwoven with matters which she knew to be merely fanciful. And then she was overwhelmed by the hopeless gravity of her state. She felt that her state was desperate. She felt that she was dying. Her unhappiness was extreme, not because she was dying, but because the veils of sense were so puzzling, so exasperating, and because her exhausted body was so vitiated in every fibre by disease. She was perfectly aware that she was going to die. She cried aloud for a pair of scissors. She wanted to cut off her hair and send part of it to Constance and part of it to her mother in separate packages. She insisted upon separate packages. Nobody would give her a pair of scissors. She implored meekly, haughtily, furiously, but nobody would satisfy her. It seemed to her shocking that all her hair should go with her into her coffin, while Constance and her mother had nothing by which to remember her, no tangible souvenir of her beauty. Then she fought for the scissors. She clutched at some one, always through those baffling veils, who was putting her into the bath by the bedside, and fought frantically. It appeared to her that this someone was the rather stout woman who had supped at Sylvain's with the quarrelsome Englishman four years ago. She could not rid herself of this singular conceit, though she knew it to be absurd. A long time afterwards. It seemed like a century. She did actually and unmistakably see the woman sitting by her bed, and the woman was crying. Why are you crying? Sophia asked, wonderingly. And the other, younger woman, who was standing at the foot of the bed, replied, You do well to ask. It is you who have hurt her, in your delirium, when you so medley demanded the scissors. The stout woman smiled with the tears on her cheeks. But Sophia wept from remorse. The stout woman looked old, worn, and untidy. The other one was much younger. Sophia did not trouble to inquire from them who they were. That little conversation formed a brief interlude in the delirium, which overtook her again and distorted everything. She forgot, however, that she was destined to die. One day her brain cleared. She could be sure that she had gone to sleep in the morning and not waken till the evening, hence she had not been put into the bath. Have I had my baths? She questioned. It was the doctor who faced her. No, he said. The baths are finished. She knew from his face that she was out of danger. Moreover, she was conscious of a new feeling in her body, as though the fount of physical energy within her, long interrupted, had recommenced to flow, but very slowly, a trickling. It was a rebirth. She was not glad, but her body itself was glad. Her body had an existence of its own. She was now often left by herself in the bedroom. So the right of the foot of the bed was a piano in walnut, and to the left a chimney-piece with a large mirror. She wanted to look at herself in the mirror, but it was a very long way off. She tried to sit up, and could not. She hoped that one day she would be able to get as far as the mirror. She said not a word about this to either of the two women. Often they would sit in the bedroom and talk without ceasing. Sophia learnt that the stout woman was named Foucault, and the other Laurence. Sometimes Laurence would address Madame Foucault's aimée, but usually she was more formal. Madame Foucault always called the other Laurence. Sophia's curiosity stirred and awoke, but she could not obtain any very exact information as to where she was, except that the house was in the Rue Brede, off the Rue Notre-Dame de Lauret. She recollected vaguely that the reputation of the street was sinister. It appeared that on the day when she had gone out with Chirac, the upper part of the Rue Notre-Dame de Lauret was closed for repairs, this she remembered, and that the cabman had turned up the Rue Brede in order to make a detour, and that it was just opposite to the house of Madame Foucault that she had lost consciousness. Madame Foucault happened to be getting into a cab at the moment, but she had told Chirac nevertheless to carry Sophia into the house, and a policeman had helped. Then, when the doctor came, it was discovered that she could not be moved, save to a hospital, and both Madame Foucault and Laurence were determined that no friend of Chirac should be committed to the horrors of a Paris hospital. Madame Foucault had suffered in one as a patient, and Laurence had been a nurse in another. Chirac was now away. The women talked loosely of a war. How kind you have been! murmured Sophia with humid eyes. But they silenced her with gestures. She was not to talk. They seemed to have nothing further to tell her. They said Chirac would be returning, perhaps soon, and that she could talk to him. Evidently they both held Chirac in affection. They said often that he was a charming boy. Bit by bit, Sophia comprehended the length and the seriousness of her illness, and the immense devotion of the two women, and the terrific disturbance of their lives, and her own debility. She saw that the women were strongly attached to her, and she could not understand why, as she had never done anything for them, whereas they had done everything for her. She had not learnt that benefits rendered, not benefits received, are the cause of such attachments. All the time she was plotting, and gathering her strength to disobey orders, and get as far as the mirror, her preliminary studies and her preparations were as elaborate as those of a prisoner arranging to escape from a fortress. The first attempt was a failure. The second succeeded. Though she could not stand without support, she managed by clinging to the bed to reach a chair, and to push the chair in front of her until it approached the mirror. The enterprise was exciting and terrific. Then she saw a face in the glass, white, incredibly emaciated, with great wild, staring eyes, and the shoulders were bent as they were with age. It was a painful, almost a horrible sight. It frightened her, so that in her alarm she recoiled from it. Not attending sufficiently to the chair, she sank to the ground. She could not pick herself up, and she was caught there, miserably by her angered jailers. The vision of her face taught her more efficiently than anything else, the gravity of her adventure. As the women lifted her inert, repentant mass into bed, she reflected, How queer my life is! It seemed to her that she ought to have been trimming hats in the showroom, instead of being in that curtained, mysterious Parisian interior. Two. One day, Madame Foucault knocked at the door of Sophia's little room. The ceremony of knocking was one of the indications that Sophia, convalescent, had been reinstated in her rights as an individual, and cried, Madame, one is going to leave you all alone for some time. Come in, said Sophia, who was sitting up in an armchair and reading. Madame Foucault opened the door. One is going to leave you all alone for some time, she repeated in a low, confidential voice, sharply contrasting with her shriek behind the door. Sophia nodded and smiled, and Madame Foucault also nodded and smiled. But Madame Foucault's face quickly resumed its anxious expression. The servant's brother marries himself to-day, and she implored me to accord her two days. What would you, Madame Laurence, is out, and I must go out. It is four o'clock. I shall re-enter at six o'clock striking. Therefore, perfectly, Sophia concurred. She looked curiously at Madame Foucault, who was carefully made up and arranged for the street, in a dress of yellow to-saur with blue ornaments, bright, lemon-coloured gloves, a little blue bonnet, and a little white parasaur, not wider when opened than her shoulders. Cheeks, lips, and eyes were heavily charged with rouge, powder, or black, and that too abundant waist had been most cunningly confined in a belt that descended beneath instead of rising above the lower masses of the vast torso. The general effect was worthy of the effort that must have gone to it. Madame Foucault was not rejuvenated by her toilette, but it almost procured her pardon for the crime of being over forty, fat, creased, and worn out. It was one of those defeats that are a triumph. You are very chic, said Sophia, uttering her admiration. Ah, said Madame Foucault, shrugging the shoulders of disillusion. Cheek, what does that do? But she was pleased. The front door banged. Sophia, by herself for the first time in the flat into which she had been carried unconscious, and which she had never since left, had the disturbing sensation of being surrounded by mysterious rooms and mysterious things. She tried to continue reading, but the sentences conveyed nothing to her. She rose, she could walk now a little, and looked out of the window, through the interstices of the pattern of the lace curtains. The window gave on the courtyard, which was about sixteen feet below her. A low wall divided the courtyard from that of the next house, and the windows of the two houses, only to be distinguished by the different tints of their yellow paint, rose tear above tear in level floors, continuing beyond Sophia's field of vision. She pressed her face against the glass, and remembered the St Luke's square of her childhood, and just as there from the showroom window she could not even by pressing her face against the glass see the pavement, so here she could not see the roof. The courtyard was like the bottom of a well. There was no end to the windows, six stories she could count, and the sills of a seventh were the limit of her view. Every window was heavily curtained, like her own. Some of the upper ones had green sun-blinds, scarcely any sound. Mysteries brooded without as well as within the flat of Madame Foucault. Sophia saw a bodiless hand twitch at a curtain and vanish. She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage on a sill in the next house. A woman, whom she took to be the concierge, appeared in the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a ray of sunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and disappeared again. Then she heard a piano somewhere. That was all. The feeling that secret and strange lives were being lived behind those baffling windows, that humanity was everywhere intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit, yet not quite unpleasantly. The environment softened her glance upon the spectacle of existence, in so much that sadness became a voluptuous pleasure, and the environment threw her back on herself into a sensuous contemplation of the fundamental fact of Sophia's scales, formerly Sophia Bain's. She turned to the room, with the marks of the bath on the floor by the bed, and the draped piano that was never opened, and her two trunks filling up the corner opposite the door. She had the idea of thoroughly examining those trunks, which, if she a wreck or somebody else, must have fetched from the hotel. At the top of one of them was her purse, tied up with old ribbon, and ostentatiously sealed. How comical these French people were when they deemed it necessary to be serious. She emptied both trunks, scrutinizing minutely all her goods, and thinking of the varied occasions upon which she had obtained them. Then she carefully restored them, her mind full of souvenirs newly awakened. She sighed as she straightened her back. A clock struck in another room. It seemed to invite her towards discoveries. She had been in no other room of the flat. She knew nothing of the rest of the flat saved by sound, for neither of the other women had ever described it, nor had it occurred to them that Sophia might care to leave her room, though she could not leave the house. She opened her door, and glanced along the dim corridor with which she was familiar. She knew that the kitchen lay next to her little room, and that next to the kitchen came the front door. On the opposite side of the corridor were four double doors. She crossed to the pair of doors facing her own little door, and quietly turned the handle. But the doors were locked. The same with the next pair. The third pair yielded, and she was in a large bedroom, with three windows on the street. She saw that the second pair of doors, which she had failed to unfasten, also opened into this room. Between the two pairs of doors was a wide bed. In front of the central window was a large dressing-table. To the left of the bed, half hiding the locked doors was a large screen. On the marble mantelpiece reflected in a huge mirror that ascended to the ornate cornice was a gilt and basalt clock with pendants to match. On the opposite side of the room from this was a long wide couch. The floor was of polished oak, with a skin on either side of the bed. At the foot of the bed was a small writing-table with a penny-bottle of ink on it. A few coloured prints and engravings, representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, and people perishing on a raft, broke the tedium of the walls. The first impression on Sophia's eye was one of somber splendour. Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped, carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness. The dark, crimson bed hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds. The counterpane was covered with lace. The window curtains had amplitude beyond the necessary, and they were suspended from behind fringed and pleated valances. The green sofa and its sateen cushions were stiff with applied embroidery. The chandelier, hanging from the middle of the ceiling, modelled to represent cupids holding festoons, was a glittering confusion of gilts and lusters. The lusters tinkled when Sophia stood on a certain part of the floor. The cane-seated chairs were completely gilded. There was an effect of spaciousness. And the situation of the bed, between the two double doors, with the three windows in front and other pairs of doors communicating with other rooms on either hand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry. But Sophia, with the sharp gaze of a woman brought up in the traditions of a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation, quickly tested and condemned the details of this chamber that imitated every luxury. Nothing in it, she found, was good. And in St. Luke's Square goodness meant honest workmanship, permanence, the absence of pretence. All the stuffs were cheap and showy and shabby. All the furniture was cracked, warped or broken. The clock showed five minutes past twelve at five o'clock, and further dust was everywhere, except in those places where even the most perfunctory cleaning could not have left it. In the obscure pleatings of draperies it lay thick. Sophia's lip curled, and instinctively she lifted her peignoir. One of her mother's phrases came into her head, a lick and a promise. And then another, if you want to leave dirt, leave it where everybody can see it, not in the corners. She peeped behind the screen, and all the horrible welter of a cabinet de toilette met her gaze, a repulsive medley of foul waters, stained vessels and cloths, brushes, sponges, powders and pastes. Clothes were hung up in disorder on rough nails. Among them she recognized a dressing-gown of Madame Foucault's, and, behind affairs of later date, the dazzling scarlet cloak in which she had first seen Madame Foucault, dilapidated now. So this was Madame Foucault's room. This was the bar from which that elegance emerged, the filth from which had sprung the mature blossom. She passed from that room direct to another, of which the shutters were closed, leaving it in twilight. This room, too, was a bedroom, rather smaller than the middle one, and having only one window, but furnished with the same dubious opulence. Dust covered it everywhere, and small foot-marks were visible in the dust on the floor. At the back was a small door, papered to match the walls, and within this door was a cabinet de toilette, with no light and no air, neither in the room nor in the closet was there any sign of individual habitation. She traversed the main bedroom again, and found another bedroom to balance the second one, but open to the full light of day, and in a state of extreme disorder. The double pillowed bed had not even been made, clothes and towels draped all the furniture, shoes were about the floor, and on a piece of string, tied across the windows hung a single, white, stocking, wet. At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as the other one, a vile, malodorous mess of appliances, whose familiar forms loomed vague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity. Sophia turned away, with the righteous disgust of one whose preparations for the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of a child. Concealed dirt shocked her, as much as it would have shocked her mother, and as for the trickeries of the toilette table, she condemned them as harshly as a young saint who has never been tempted, condemns moral weakness. She thought of the strange, flaccid daily life of those two women, whose hours seemed to slip unprofitably away without any result of achievement. She had actually witnessed nothing, but since the beginning of her convalescence her ears had heard, and she could piece the evidences together. There was never any sound in the flat, outside the kitchen, until noon. Then vague noises and smells would commence. And about one o'clock, Madame Foucault disarrayed would come to inquire if the servant had attended to the needs of the invalid. Then the odours of cookery would accentuate themselves, bells rang, fragments of conversations escaped through doors ajar. Occasionally a man's voice or a heavy step. Then the fragrance of coffee, sometimes the sound of a kiss, the banging of the front door, the noise of brushing, or of the shaking of a carpet. A little scream as at some trifling domestic contretin. Laurence, still in a dressing-gown, would lounge into Sapa's room, dirty, haggard, but polite with a curious stiff ceremony, and would drink her coffee there. This wandering in peignoirs would continue till three o'clock, and then Laurence might say, as if nerving herself to an unusual and immense effort, I must be dressed by five o'clock. I have not a moment. Often Madame Foucault did not dress at all. On such days, she would go to bed immediately after dinner, with the remark that she didn't know what was the matter with her, but she was exhausted. And then the servant would retire to her seventh floor, and there would be silence until, now and then, faint creepings were heard at midnight or after. Once or twice, through the chinks of her door, Sophia had seen a light at two o'clock in the morning, just before the dawn. Yet these were the women who had saved her life, who between them had put her into a cold bath every three hours, nights and day, for weeks. Surely it was impossible after that to despise them for shiftlessness and talkative idling in peignoirs. Impossible to despise them for anything whatever. But Sophia, conscious of her inheritance of strong and resolute character, did despise them as poor things. The one point on which she envied them was their formal manners to her, which seemed to become more dignified and graciously distant as her health improved. It was always Madame, Madame to her, with an intonation of increasing deference. They might have been apologizing to her for themselves. She prowled into all the corners of the flat, but she discovered no more rooms, nothing but a large cupboard, crammed with Madame Foucault's dresses. Then she went back to the large bedroom, and enjoyed the busy movement and rattle of the sloping street, and had long vague yearnings, for strength and for freedom in wide sane places. She decided that on the morrow she would dress herself properly, and never again wear a peignoir. The peignoir and all that it represented disgusted her. And while looking at the street, she ceased to see it, and saw Cook's office, and Shearac helping her into the carriage. Where was he? Why had he brought her to this impossible abode? What did he mean by such conduct? But could he have acted otherwise? He had done the one thing that he could do. Chance. Chance. And why an impossible abode? Was one place more impossible than another? All this came of running away from home with Gerald. It was remarkable that she seldom thought of Gerald. He had vanished from her life as he had come into it, madly, preposterously. She wondered what the next stage in her career would be. She certainly could not forecast it. Perhaps Gerald was starving, or in prison. That exclamation expressed her appalling disdain of Gerald, and of the Sophia who had once deemed him the paragon of men. Bah! A carriage, stopping in front of the house, awakened her from her meditation. Madame Foucault, and a man very much younger than Madame Foucault, got out of it. Sophia fled. After all, this prying into other people's rooms was quite inexcusable. She dropped onto her own bed, and picked up a book in case Madame Foucault should come in. Three. In the evening, just after night had fallen, Sophia on the bed heard the sound of raised and acrimonious voices in Madame Foucault's room. Nothing except dinner had happened since the arrival of Madame Foucault and the young man. These two had evidently dined informally in the bedroom, on a dish or so prepared by Madame Foucault, who had herself served Sophia with her involuntary past. The odours of cookery still hung in the air. The noise of virulent discussion increased and continued, and then Sophia could hear sobbing, broken by short and fierce phrases from the man. Then the door of the bedroom opened brusquely. Jean et soupe! exclaimed the man in tones of angry disgust. Les aimoirs, je te prie! And then a soft muffled sound, as of a struggle, a quick step, and a very violent banging of the front door. After that there was a noticeable silence, save for the regular sobbing. Sophia wondered when it would cease that monotonous sobbing. What is the matter? she called out from her bed. The sobbing grew louder, like the sobbing of a child who has detected an awakening of sympathy and instinctively begins to practice upon it. In the end Sophia arose and put on the peignoir which she had almost determined never to wear again. The broad corridor was lighted by a small, smelling oil lamp with a crimson globe. That soft, transforming radiance seemed to paint the whole corridor with voluptuous luxury, so much so that it was impossible to believe that the smell came from the lamp. Under the lamp lay Madame Foucault on the floor, a shapeless mass of lace, frilled linen, and corset. Her light brown hair was loose and spread about the floor. At the first glance the creature abandoned to grief made a romantic and striking picture, and Sophia thought for an instant that she had at length encountered life on a plane that would correspond to her dreams of romance. And she was impressed, with a feeling somewhat akin to that of a middling commoner when confronted with a vikount. There was in the distance something imposing and sensational about that prone, trembling figure. The tragic works of love were therein apparently manifest in a sort of dignified beauty. But when Sophia bent over Madame Foucault and touched her flabbiness, this illusion at once vanished, and instead of being dramatically pathetic, the woman was ridiculous. Her face, especially as damaged by tears, could not support the ordeal of inspection. It was horrible. Not a picture, but a palette, or like the coloured design of a pavement artist after a heavy shower. Her great, relaxed eyelids alone would have rendered any face absurd. And there were monstrous details far worse than the eyelids. Then she was amazingly fat. Her flesh seemed to be escaping at all ends, from a corset strained to the utmost limit. And above her boots, she was still wearing dainty, high-heeled, tightly laced boots. The calves bulged suddenly out. As a woman of between forty and fifty, the obese sepulcher of a dead, vulgar beauty, she had no right to passions and tears and homage, or even the means of life. She had no right to expose herself picturesquely beneath the crimson glow in all the panoply of ribbed garters and lacy seductiveness. It was silly. It was disgraceful. She ought to have known that only youth and slimmness have the right to appeal to the feelings by indecent abandonments. Such were the thoughts that mingled with the sympathy of the beautiful and slim Sophia, as she bent down to Madame Foucault. She was sorry for her landlady, but at the same time she despised her, and resented her woe. So what is the matter, she asked quietly. He has chugged me, stammered Madame Foucault, and he is the last to have no one now. She rolled over in the most grotesque manner, kicking up her legs with a fresh outburst of sobs. Sophia felt quite ashamed for her. Come and lie down. Come now, she said, with a touch of sharpness. You mustn't lie there like that. Madame Foucault's behaviour was really too outrageous. Sophia helped her, morally rather than physically, to rise, and then persuaded her into the large bedroom. Madame Foucault fell on the bed, of which the counter-pane had been thrown over the foot. Sophia covered the lower part of her heaving body with the counter-pane. Now, calm yourself, please. This room, too, was lit in crimson by a small lamp that stood on the night-table, and though the shade of the lamp was cracked, the general effect of the great chamber was incontestably romantic. Only the pillows of the wide bed and the small semicircle of floor were illuminated, all the rest lay in shadow. Madame Foucault's head had dropped between the pillows. A tray containing dirty plates and glasses and a wine-bottle was speciously picturesque on the writing-table. Despite her genuine gratitude to Madame Foucault for astounding care during her illness, Sophia did not like her landlady, and the present scene made her coldly wrathful. She saw the probability of having another's troubles piled on top of her own. She did not, in her mind, actively object, because she felt that she could not be more hopelessly miserable than she was, but she passively resented the imposition. Her reason told her that she ought to sympathize with this aging, ugly, disagreeable, undignified woman, but her heart was reluctant. Her heart did not want to know anything at all about Madame Foucault, nor to enter into any way into her private life. I have not a single friend now, stammered Madame Foucault. Oh, if you have, said Sophia cheerfully, you have Madame Laurence. Laurence, that is not a friend. You know what I mean. And me, I am your friend, said Sophia, in obedience to her conscience. You are very kind, replied Madame Foucault from the pillow. But you know what I mean. The fact was that Sophia did know what she meant. The terms of their intercourse had been suddenly changed. There was no pretentious ceremony now, but the sincerity that disaster brings. The vast structure of make-believe, which between them they had gradually built, had crumbled to nothing. I never treated badly any man in my life, whimpered Madame Foucault. I have always been a good girl. There is not a man who can say I have not been a good girl. Never was I a girl like the rest. And everyone has said so. When I tell you that once I had a hotel in the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense, four horses, I have sold a horse to Madame Moussard. You know Madame Moussard. But one cannot make economies. Impossible to make economies. In fifty-six I was spending a hundred thousand francs a year. That cannot last. Always I have said to myself that cannot last. Always I had the intention. But what would you? I installed myself here and borrowed money to pay for the furniture. There did not remain to me one jewel. The men of Paltrunes all. I could let three bedrooms for three hundred and fifty francs a month, and with serving meals and so on I could live. Then that, so far interrupted, pointing to her own bedroom across the corridor, is your room? Yes, said Madame Foucault. I put you in it because at the moment all these were let. They are so no longer, only one, Laurence, and she does not pay me always. What would you? Tenants? That does not find itself at the present hour. I have nothing, and I owe. And he quits me. He chooses this moment to quid me. Why? For nothing, for nothing. That is not for his money that I regret it. No, no. You know at his age he is twenty-five, and with a woman like me one is not generous. No, I loved him. And then a man has a moral support always. I loved him. It is at my age mine that one knows how to love. Beauty goes always, but not the temperament. Ah, that. No, I loved him. I love him. So far as faith tingled with a sudden emotion called by the repetition of these last three words whose spell no usage can mar. But she said nothing. Do you know what I shall become? There is nothing but that for me, and I know of such who are there already. A charwoman. Yes, a charwoman. More soon or more late. That is life. What would you? One exists always. Then, in a different tone, I'd make a pardon, madame, for talking like this I ought to have shame. And Sophia felt that in listening she also ought to be ashamed, but she was not ashamed. Everything seemed very natural and even ordinary, and moreover Sophia was full of the sense of her superiority over the woman on the bed. Four years ago, in the restaurant Sylvain, the ingenuous and ignorant Sophia had shyly sat in awe of the resplendent courtesan, with her haughty stare, her large, easy gestures, and her imperturbable contempt for the man who was paying. And now Sophia knew that she, Sophia, knew all that was to be known about human nature. She had not merely youth, beauty, and virtue, but knowledge. Knowledge enough to reconcile her to her own misery. She had a vigorous, clear mind, and a clean conscience. She could look any one in the face, and judge every one too as a woman of the world. Whereas this obscene wreck on the bed had nothing whatever left. She had not merely lost her effulgent beauty. She had become repulsive. She could never have had any common sense nor any force of character. Her haughtiness in the day of glory was simply fatuous, based on stupidity. She had passed the years in idleness, trailing about all day in stuffy rooms, and emerging at night to impress ninker-boops. Continually meaning to do things which she never did. Continually surprised at the lateness of the hour. Continually occupied with the most foolish trifles. And here she was at over forty, riding about on the bare floor, because a boy of twenty-five who must be a worthless idiot, had abandoned her after a scene of ridiculous shoutings and stampings. She was dependent on the caprices of a young scamp, the last donkey to turn from her with loathing. Sophia thought, goodness, if I had been in her place I shouldn't have been like that. I should have been rich. I should have saved like a miser. I wouldn't have been dependent on anybody at that age. If I couldn't have made a better courtesan than this pitiable woman, I would have drowned myself. In the harsh vanity of her conscious capabilities and young strength, she thought thus, half forgetting her own follies, and half excusing them on the ground of inexperience. Sophia wanted to go round the flat and destroy every crimson lampshade in it. She wanted to shake Madame Foucault into self-respect and sagacity. Moral reprehension, though present in her mind, was only faint. Certainly she felt the immense gulf between the honest woman and the wanton, but she did not feel it as she would have expected to feel it. What a fool you have been, she thought, not what a sinner. Not what a sinner. With her precocious cynicism, which was somewhat unsuited to the lovely northern youthfulness of that face, she said to herself that the whole situation and their relative attitudes would have been different if only Madame Foucault has had the wit to a mass of fortune, as, according to Gerald, some of her rivals had succeeded in doing. And all the time she was thinking in another part of her mind, I ought not to be here. It's no use arguing I ought not to be here. Sure act did the only thing for me there was to do, but I must go now. Madame Foucault continued to recite her woes, chiefly financial, in a weak voice damp with tears. She also continued to apologize for mentioning herself. She had finished sobbing and lay looking at the wall away from Sophia, who stood in resolute near the bed, ashamed for her companion's weakness and incapacity. You must not forget, said Sophia, irritated by the unrelieved darkness of the picture drawn by Madame Foucault, that at least I owe you a considerable sum and that I am only waiting for you to tell me how much it is. I have asked you twice already, I think. Oh, you are still suffering, said Madame Foucault. I am quite well enough to pay my debts, said Sophia. I do not like to accept money from you, said Madame Foucault. But why not? You will have the doctor to pay. Please do not talk in that way, said Sophia, I have money, and I can pay for everything, and I shall pay for everything. She was annoyed because she was sure that Madame Foucault was only making a pretense of delicacy and that in any case her delicacy was preposterous. Sophia had remarked this on the two previous occasions when she had mentioned the subject of bills. Madame Foucault would not treat her as an ordinary lodger, now that the illness was passed. She wanted, as it were, to complete brilliantly what she had begun, and to live in Sophia's memory as a unique figure of lavish philanthropy. This was a sentiment, a luxury, that she desired to offer herself, the thought that she had played Providence to a respectable married lady in distress. She frequently hinted at Sophia's misfortunes and helplessness, but she could not afford the luxury. She gazed at it as a poor woman gazes at costly stuffs through the glass of a shop window. The truth was that she wanted the luxury for nothing. For a double reason Sophia was exasperated by Madame Foucault's absurd desire and by a natural objection to the role of a subject for philanthropy. She would not admit that Madame Foucault's devotion as a nurse entitled her to the satisfaction of being a philanthropist when there was no necessity for philanthropy. How long have I been here? asked Sophia. I don't know. Mermitt, Madame Foucault, eight weeks, or is it nine? Suppose we say nine, said Sophia. Very well, agreed Madame Foucault, apparently reluctant. Now, how much must I pay you per week? I don't want anything. I don't want anything. You are a friend of Shirak's. You—not at all! Sophia interrupted, tapping her foot and biting her lip. Naturally I must pay. Madame Foucault wept quietly. Shall I pay you seventy-five francs a week? said Sophia, anxious to end the matter. It is too much! Madame Foucault protested insincerely. What! for all you have done for me? I speak not of that. Madame Foucault modestly replied. If the demotion was not to be paid for, then seventy-five francs a week was assuredly too much, as during more than half the time Sophia had had almost no food. Madame Foucault was therefore within the truth when she had gained protested at the site of the banknotes which Sophia brought from her trunk. I am sure it is too much. Not at all, Sophia repeated, nine weeks at seventy-five. That makes six hundred and seventy-five. Here are seven hundreds. I have no change, said Madame Foucault. I have nothing. That will pay for the hire of the bath, said Sophia. She laid the notes on the pillow. Madame Foucault looked at them gluttonously, as any other person would have done in her place. She did not touch them. After an instant she burst into wild tears. But why do you cry? Sophia asked, softened. I don't know, spluttered Madame Foucault. You are so beautiful. I am so content that we saved you. Her great wet eyes rested on Sophia. It was sentimentality. Sophia ruthlessly set it down as sentimentality. But she was touched. She was suddenly moved. Those women, such as they were in their foolishness, probably had saved her life. And she a stranger. Flaccid as they were, they had been capable of resolute perseverance there. It was possible to say that chance had thrown them upon an enterprise which they could not have abandoned till they, or death, had won. It was possible to say that they hoped vaguely to derive advantage from their labours, but even then, judged by an ordinary standard, those women had been angels of mercy. And Sophia was despising them, cruely taking their motives to pieces, accusing them of incapacity when she herself stood a supreme proof of their capacity in, at any rate, one direction. In a rush of emotion she saw her hardness and her injustice. She bent down. Never can I forget how kind you have been to me. It is incredible, incredible. She spoke softly, in tones loaded with genuine feeling. It was all she said. She could not embroider on the theme. She had no talent for thanksgiving. Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant to kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips, but refrained. Her head sank back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of nervous sobbing. Immediately afterwards, there was the sound of a latch-key in the front door of the flat. The bedroom door was open. Still sobbing, very violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the banknotes under the pillow. Madame Laurence, as she was called, Sophia had never heard her surname, came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with astonishment in her dark, twinkling eyes. She was usually dressed in black, because people said that black suited her, and because black was never out of fashion. Black was an expression of her idiosyncrasy. She showed a certain elegance, and by comparison with the extreme disorder of Madame Foucault, at the deserbie of Sophia, her appearance, all fresh from a modish restaurant, was brilliant. He gave her an advantage over the other two, that moral advantage which ceremonial raiment always gives. What is it that passes, she demanded? He has chucked me, Laurence, exclaimed Madame Foucault, in a sort of hysteric scream which seemed to force its way through her sobs. From the extraordinary freshness of Madame Foucault's woe, it might have been supposed that her young man had only that instant strode out. Laurence and Sophia exchanged a swift glance, and Laurence, of course, perceived that Sophia's relations with her landlady and nurse were now of a different or more candid order. She indicated her perception of the change by a single slight movement of the eyebrows. But listen, they may, she said authoritatively, you must not let yourself go like that. He will return. Never! cried Madame Foucault. It is finished, and he is the last. Laurence, ignoring Madame Foucault, approached Sophia. You have an air very fatigued, she said, caressing Sophia's shoulder with her gloved hand. You are pale like everything. All this is not for you. It is not reasonable to remain here. You still suffering at this hour. Truly not reasonable. Her hands persuaded Sophia towards the corridor, and in fact Sophia did then notice her own exhaustion. She departed from the room with the ready obedience of physical weakness, and shut her door. After about half an hour, during which she heard confused noises and murmurings, her door half opened. May I enter since you are not asleep? It was Laurence's voice. Twice now she had addressed Sophia without adding the formal Madame. Enter, I beg you. Sophia called from the bed. I am reading. Laurence came in. Sophia was both glad and sorry to see her. She was eager to hear gossip, which, however, she felt she ought to despise. Moreover, she knew that if they talked that night they would talk as friends, and that Laurence would ever after treat her with the familiarity of a friend, this she dreaded. Still, she knew that she would yield, at any rate to the temptation to listen to gossip. I have put her to bed, said Laurence in a whisper, as she cautiously closed the door. The poor woman! Oh! what a charming bracelet! It is a true pearl, naturally. Her roving eye had immediately, with an infallible instinct, caught sight of a bracelet, which, in taking stock of her possessions, Sophia had accidentally left on the piano. She picked it up, and then put it down again. Yes, said Sophia. She was about to add, it's nearly all the jewellery I possess that she stopped. Laurence moved towards Sophia's bed, and stood over it, as she had often done in her quality as nurse. She had taken off her gloves, and she made a pecan pretty show with her thirty years, and her agreeable, slightly roguish face, in which were mingled the knowingness of a street boy, and the confidence of a woman who has ceased to be surprised at the influence of her snub nose on a highly intelligent man. Did she tell you what they had quarrelled about? Laurence inquired abruptly, and not only the phrasing of the question, but the assured tone in which it was uttered, showed that Laurence meant to be the familiar of Sophia. Not a word, said Sophia. In this brief question I'd reply, all was crudely implied that had previously been supposed not to exist. The relations between the two women were altered irretrievably in the moment. It must have been her fault, said Laurence. With men she is insupportable. I have never understood how that poor woman has made her way. With women she is charming, but she seems to be incapable of not treating men like dogs. Some men adore that, but they are few, is it not? Sophia smiled. I have told her how many times have I told her, but it is useless. It is stronger than she is, and if she finishes on straw one will be able to say that it was because of that. But truly she ought not to have asked him here. Truly that was too much, if he knew. Why not? asked Sophia awkwardly. The answer startled her. Because her room has not been disinfected. But I thought all the flat had been disinfected. All except her room. But why not her room? Laurence shrugged her shoulders. She did not want to disturb her things. It is that I know. She is like that. She takes an idea, and then there you are. She told me every room had been disinfected. She told the same to the police and the doctor. Then all the disinfection is useless. Perfectly. But she is like that. This flat might be very remunerative, but with her never. She has not even paid for the furniture, after two years. But what will become of her? Sophia asked. Ah, that. Another shrug of the shoulders. All that I know is that it will be necessary for me to leave here. The last time I brought Mr. Surf here she was excessively rude to him. She has darsely told you about Mr. Surf? No. Who is Mr. Surf? Ah, she has not told you. That astonishes me. Mr. Surf, that is my friend, you know. Oh! murmured Sophia. Yes, Laurence proceeded, impelled by a desire to impress Sophia and to gossip at large. That is my friend. I knew him at the hospital. It was to please him that I left the hospital. After that we quarreled for two years, but at the end he gave me right. I did not budge. Two years. It is long. And I had left the hospital. I could have gone back. But I would not. That is not a life to be nurse in a Paris hospital. No. I drew myself out as well as I could. He is the most charming boy you can imagine and rich now. That is to say, relatively. He has a cousin infinitely more rich than he. I dined with him both tonight at the Mise en Deux. For a luxurious boy he is a luxurious boy. The cousin, I mean. It appears that he has made a fortune in Canada. Truly, said Sophia with politeness. Laurence's hand was playing on the edge of the bed. And Sophia observed for the first time that it bore a wedding ring. You remarked my ring. Laurence laughed. That is he, the cousin. What? He said. You do not wear an alliance. An alliance is more proper. We are going to arrange that after dinner. I said that all the jeweller shops would be closed. That is all the same to me, he said. We will open one. And in fact it passed like that. He succeeded. Is it not beautiful? She held forth her hand. Yes, said Sophia, it is very beautiful. Yours also is beautiful, said Laurence, with an extremely puzzling intonation. It is just the ordinary English wedding ring, said Sophia. In spite of herself, she blushed. Now I have married you. It is I, the cur. Said he, the cousin. When he put the ring on my finger. Oh, he is excessively amusing. He pleases me much. And he is all alone. He asked me whether I knew among my friends a sympathetic, pretty girl, to make four with us three for a picnic. I said I was not sure. But I thought not. Whom do I know? Nobody. I am not a woman like the rest. I am always discreet. I do not like casual relations. But he is very well, the cousin. Brown eyes. It is an idea. Will you come one day? He speaks English. He loves the English. He is all that is most correct. The perfect gentleman. He would arrange a dazzling feta. I am sure he would be enchanted to make your acquaintance. Enchanted. As for my Charles, happily he is completely mad about me. Otherwise I should have fear. She smiled. And in her smile was a genuine respect for Sophia's face. I fear I cannot come, said Sophia. She honestly endeavored to keep out of her reply any accent of moral superiority. But she did not quite succeed. She was not at all horrified by Laurence's suggestion. She meant simply to refuse it. But she could not do so in a natural voice. It is true, you are not yet strong enough, said the imperturbable Laurence quickly, and with a perfect imitation of naturalness. But soon you must make a little promenade. She stared at her ring. After all, it is more proper. She observed judicially. With a wedding ring, one is less likely to be annoyed. What is curious is that the idea never before came to me yet. You like jewelry, said Sophia? Oh, if I like jewelry, with the gesture of the hands. Will you pass me that bracelet? Laurence obeyed, and Sophia clasped it round the girl's wrist. Keep it, Sophia said. For me, Laurence exclaimed, ravished, it is too much. It is not enough, said Sophia. And when you look at it, you must remember how kind you were to me and how grateful I am. How nicely you look at me. How nicely you say that, Laurence said ecstatically. And Sophia felt that she had indeed said it rather nicely. This giving of the bracelet, souvenir of one of the few capricious follies that Gerald had committed for her, and not for himself, pleased Sophia very much. I am afraid your nursing of me forced you to neglect, Mr. Surf, she added. Oh, yes, a little, said Laurence impartially, with a small part of haughtiness. It is true that he used to complain, but I soon put him straight. What an idea! He knows there are things upon which I do not joke. It is not he who will quarrel a second time. Believe me. Laurence's absolute conviction of her power was what impressed Sophia. To Sophia she seemed to be a vulgar little piece of goods, with dubious charm, and a glance that was far too brazen. Her movements were vulgar. And Sophia wondered how she had established her empire, and upon what it rested. I shall not show this to Emma, whispered Laurence, indicating the bracelet. As you wish, said Sophia. By the way, have I told you that war is declared? Laurence casually remarked. No, said Sophia, what war? The scene with Emma made me forget it, with the Germany. The city is quite excited, an immense crowd in front of the new opera. They say we shall be at Berlin in a month, or at most two months. Oh! Sophia muttered, why is there a war? Ah! it is I who asked that. Nobody knows. It is those Prussians. Don't you think we ought to begin again with the disinfecting? Sophia asked anxiously. I must speak to Madame Foucault. Laurence told her not to worry, and went off to show the bracelet to Madame Foucault. She had privately decided that this was a pleasure which, after all, she could not deny herself.