"ROMANCE"
At two periods of the day Marthe, with great effort and for
professional purposes, achieved some degree of personal tidiness.
The first period began at about four o'clock in the afternoon. By six
o'clock or six-thirty she had slipped back into the sloven. The second
period began at about ten o'clock at night. It was more brilliant
while it lasted, but owing to the accentuation of Marthe's
characteristics by fatigue it seldom lasted more than an hour. When
Marthe opened the door to G.J. she was at her proudest, intensely
conscious of being clean and neat, and unwilling to stand any nonsense
from anybody. Of course she was polite to G.J. as the chief friend of
the establishment and a giver of good tips, but she deprecated calls
by gentlemen in the evening, for unless they were made by appointment
the risk of complications at once arose.
The mention of an air-raid rendered her definitely inimical. Formerly
Marthe had been more than average nervous in air-raids, but she had
grown used to them and now defied them. As she kept all windows closed
on principle she heard less of raids than some people. G.J. did not
explain the circumstances. He simply asked if Madame had returned. No,
Madame had not returned. True, Marthe had not been unaware of guns and
things, but there was no need to worry; Madame must have arrived at
the theatre long before the guns started. Marthe really could not be
bothered with these unnecessary apprehensions. She had her duties to
attend to like other folks, and they were heavy, and she washed her
hands of air-raids; she accepted no responsibility for them; for her,
within the flat, they did not exist, and the whole German war-machine
was thereby foiled. G.J. was on the point of a full explanation,
but he checked himself. A recital of the circumstances would not
immediately help, and it might hinder. Concealing his astonishment at
the excesses of which unimaginative stolidity is capable, even in an
Italian, he turned down the stairs again.
He stopped in the middle of the stairs, because he did not know what
he was going to do, and he seemed to lack force for decisions. No harm
could have happened to Christine; she had run off, that was certain.
And yet--had he not often heard of the impish tricks of explosions?
Of one person being taken and another left? Was it not possible that
Christine had been blown to the other end of the street, and was now
lying there?... No! Either she was on her way home, or, automatically,
she had scurried to the theatre, which was close to St. Martin's
Street, and been too fearful to venture forth again. Perhaps she was
looking somewhere for _him_. Yet she might be dead. In any case, what
could he do? Ring up the police? It was too soon. He decided that he
would wait in Cork Street for half an hour. This plan appealed to him
for the mere reason that it was negative.
As he opened the front door he saw a taxi standing outside. The
taxi-man had taken one of the lamps from its bracket, and was looking
into the interior of the cab, which was ornate with toy-curtains
and artificial flowers to indicate to the world that he was an
owner-driver and understood life. Hearing the noise of the door,
he turned his head--he was wearing a bowler hat and a smart white
muffler--and said to G.J., with self-respecting respect for a
gentleman:
"This is No. 170, isn't it, sir?"
"Yes."
The taxi-man jerked his head to draw G.J.'s attention to the interior
of the vehicle. Christine was half on the seat and half on the floor,
unconscious, with shut eyes.
Instantly G.J. was conscious of making a complete recovery from all
the effects, physical and moral, of the air-raid.
"Just help me to get her out, will you?" he said in a casual tone,
"and I'll carry her upstairs. Where did you pick the lady up?"
"Strand, sir, nearly opposite Romano's."
"The dickens you did!"
"Shock from air-raid, I suppose, sir."
"Probably."
"She did seem a little upset when she hailed me, or I shouldn't have
taken her. I was off home, and I only took her to oblige."
The taxi-man ran quickly round to the other side of the cab and
entered it by the off-door, behind Christine. Together the men lifted
her up.
"I can manage her," said G.J. calmly.
"Excuse me, sir, you'll have to get hold lower down, so as her
waist'll be nearly as high as your shoulder. My brother's a fireman."
"Right," said G.J. "By the way, what's the fare?"
Holding Christine across his shoulder with the right arm, he
unbuttoned his overcoat with his left hand and took out change from
his trouser pocket for the driver.
"You might pull the door to after me," he said, in response to the
driver's expression of thanks.
"Certainly, sir."
The door banged. He was alone with Christine on the long, dark,
inclement stairs. He felt the contours of her body through her
clothes. She was limp, helpless. She was a featherweight. She was
nothing at all; inexpressibly girlish, pathetic, dear. Never had G.J.
felt as he felt then. He mounted the stairs rather quickly, with firm,
disdaining steps, and, despite his being a little out of breath,
he had a tremendous triumph over the stolidity of Marthe when she
answered his ring. Marthe screamed, and in the scream readjusted her
views concerning air-raids.
"It's queer this swoon lasting such a long time!" he reflected, when
Christine had been deposited on the sofa in the sitting-room, and the
common remedies and tricks tried without result, and Marthe had gone
into the kitchen to make hot water hotter.
He had established absolute empire over Marthe. He had insisted on
Marthe not being silly; and yet, though he had already been
silly himself in his absurd speculations as to the possibility of
Christine's death, he was now in danger of being silly again. Did
ordinary swoons ever continue as this one was continuing? Would
Christine ever come out of it? He stood with his back to the
fireplace, and her head and shoulders were right under him, so that he
looked almost perpendicularly down upon them. Her face was as pale as
ivory; every drop of blood seemed to have left it; the same with
her neck and bosom; her limbs had dropped anyhow, in disarray; a fur
jacket was untidily cast over her black muslin dress. But her waved
hair, fresh from the weekly visit of the professional coiffeur,
remained in the most perfect order.
G.J. looked round the room. It was getting very shabby. Its pale
enamelled shabbiness and the tawdry ugliness of nearly every object
in it had never repelled and saddened him as they did then. The sole
agreeable item was a large photograph of the mistress in a rich silver
frame which he had given her. She would not let him buy knicknacks or
draperies for her drawing-room; she preferred other presents. And now
that she lay in the room, but with no power to animate it, he
knew what the room really looked like; it looked like a dentist's
waiting-room, except that no dentist would expose copies of _La Vie
Parisienne_ to the view of clients. It had no more individuality than
a dentist's waiting-room. Indeed it was a dentist's waiting-room.
He remembered that he had had similar ideas about the room at the
beginning of his acquaintance with Christine; but he had partially
forgotten them, and moreover, they had not by any means been so clear
and desolating as in that moment.
He looked from the photograph to her face. The face was like the
photograph, but in the swoon its wistfulness became unbearable. And
it was so young. What was she? Twenty-seven? She could not be
twenty-eight. No age! A girl! And talk about experience! She had had
scarcely any experience, save one kind of experience. The monotony and
narrowness of her life was terrifying to him. He had fifty interests,
but she had only one. All her days were alike. She had no change
and no holiday; no past and no future; no family; no intimate
friends--unless Marthe was an intimate friend; no horizons, no
prospects. She witnessed life in London through the distorting,
mystifying veil of a foreign language imperfectly understood. She was
the most solitary girl in London, or she would have been were there
not a hundred thousand or so others in nearly the same case.... Stay!
Once she had delicately allowed him to divine that she had been to
Bournemouth with a gentleman for a week-end. He could recall
nothing else. Nightly, or almost nightly, she listened to the same
insufferably tedious jokes in the same insufferably tedious revue. But
the authorities were soon going to deprive her of the opportunity of
doing that. And then she would cease to receive even the education
that revues can furnish, and in her mind no images would survive but
images connected with the material arts of love. For, after all,
what had they truly in common, he and she, but a periodical transient
excitation?
When next he looked at her, her eyes were wide open and a flush was
coming, as imperceptibly as the dawn, into her cheeks. He took her
hands again and rubbed them. Marthe returned, and Christine drank. She
gazed, in weak silence, first at Marthe and then at G.J. After a few
moments no one spoke. Marthe took off Christine's boots, and rubbed
her stockinged feet, and then kissed them violently.
"Madame should go to bed."
"I am better."
Marthe left the room, seeming resentful.
"What has passed?" Christine murmured, without smiling.
"A faint in the taxi, my poor child. That was all," said G.J. calmly.
"But how is it that I find myself here?"
"I carried thee upstairs in my arms."
"Thou?"
"Why not?" He spoke lightly, with careful negligence. "It appears that
thou wast in the Strand."
"Was I? I lost thee. Something tore thee from me. I ran. I ran till I
could not run. I was sure that never more should I see thee alive. Oh!
My Gilbert, what terrible moments! What a catastrophe! Never shall I
forget those moments!"
G.J. said, with bland supremacy:
"But it is necessary that thou shouldst forget them. Master thyself.
Thou knowst now what it is--an air-raid. It was an ordinary air-raid.
There have been many like it. There will be many more. For once we
were in the middle of a raid--by chance. But we are safe--that is
enough."
"But the deaths?"
He shook his head.
"But there must have been many deaths!"
"I do not know. There will have been deaths. There usually are." He
shrugged his shoulders.
Christine sat up and gave a little screech.
"Ah!" She burst out, her features suddenly transformed by enraged
protest. "Why wilt thou act thy cold man?"
He was amazed at the sudden nervous strength she showed.
"But, my little one--"
She cried:
"Why wilt thou act thy cold man? I shall become mad in this sacred
England. I shall become totally mad. You are all the same, all, all,
men and women. You are marvels--let it be so!--but you are not human.
Do you then wish to be taken for telegraph-poles? Always you are
pretending something. Pretending that you have no sentiments. And you
are soaked in sentimentality. But no! You will not show it! You will
not applaud your soldiers in the streets. You will not salute your
flag. You will not salute even a corpse. You have only one phrase: 'It
is nothing'. If you win a battle, 'It is nothing' If you lose one, 'It
is nothing'. If you are nearly killed in an air-raid, 'It is nothing'.
And if you were killed outright and could yet speak, you would say,
with your eternal sneer, 'It is nothing'. You other men, you make love
with the air of turning on a tap. As for your women, god knows--! But
I have a horror of Englishwomen. Prudes but wantons. Can I not guess?
Always hypocrites. Always holding themselves in. My god, that pinched
smile! And your women of the world especially. Have they a natural
gesture? Yet does not everyone know that they are rotten with vice and
perversity? And your actresses!... And they talk of us! Ah, well! For
me, I can say that I earn my living honestly, every son of it. For all
that I receive, I give. And they would throw me on to the pavement to
starve, me whose function in society--"
She collapsed in sobs, and with averted face held out her arms in
appeal. G.J., at once admiring and stricken with compassion, bent
and clasped her neck, and kissed her, and kept his mouth on hers.
Her tears dropped freely on his cheeks. Her sobs shook both of them.
Gradually the sobs decreased in violence and frequency. In an infant's
broken voice she murmured into his mouth:
"My wolf! Is it true--that thou didst carry me here in thy arms? I am
so proud."
He was not in the slightest degree irritated or grieved by her tirade.
But the childlike changeableness and facility of her emotions touched
him. He savoured her youth, and himself felt curiously young. It was
the fact that within the last year he had grown younger.
He thought of great intellectuals, artists, men of action, princes,
kings--historical figures--in whom courtesans had inspired immortal
passion. He thought of the illustrious courtesans who had made
themselves heroic in legend, women whose loves were countless and
often venal, and yet whose renown had come down to posterity as
gloriously as that of supreme poets. He thought of lifelong passionate
attachments, which to the world were inexplicable, and which the world
never tired of leniently discussing. He overheard people saying: "Yes.
Picked her up somewhere, in a Promenade. She worships him, and he
adores her. Don't know where he hides her. You see them about together
sometimes--at concerts, for instance. Mysterious-looking creature she
is. Plays the part very well, too. Strange affair. But, of course,
there's no accounting for these things."
The role attracted him. And there could be no doubt that she did
worship him utterly. He did not analyse his feeling for her--perhaps
could not. She satisfied something in him that was profound. She
never offended his sensibilities, nor wearied him. Her manners were
excellent, her gestures full of grace and modesty, her temperament
extreme. A unique combination! And if the tie between them was not
real and secure, why should he have yearned for her company that night
after the scenes with Concepcion and Queen. Those women challenged
him, discomposed him, fretted him, fought him, left his nerves raw.
She soothed. Why should he not, in the French phrase, "put her among
her own furniture?" In a proper artistic environment, an environment
created by himself, of taste and moderate luxury, she would be
exquisite. She would blossom. And she would blossom for him alone.
She would live for his footstep on her threshold; and when he was
not there she would dream amid cushions like a cat. In the right
environment she would become another being, that was to say, the same
being, but orchidised. And when he was old, when he was sixty-five,
she would still be young, still be under forty and seductive. And the
publishing of his last will and testament, under which she inherited
all, would render her famous throughout all the West End, and the word
"romance" would spring to every lip. He searched in his mind for the
location of suitable flats.
"Is it true that thou didst carry me in thine arms?" repeated
Christine.
He murmured into her mouth:
"Is it true? Can she doubt? The proof, then."
And he picked her up as though she had been a doll, and carried her
into the bedroom. As she lay on the bed, she raised her arm and looked
at the broken wrist-watch and sighed.
"My mascot. It is not a _blague_, my mascot."
Shortly afterwards she began to cry again, at first gently; then sobs
supervened.
"She must sleep," he said firmly.
She shook her head.
"I cannot. I have been too upset. It is impossible that I should
sleep."
"She must."
"Go and buy me a drug."
"If I go and buy her a drug, will she undress and get into bed while I
am away?"
She nodded.
Calling Marthe, and taking the latch-key of the street-door, he went
to his chemist's in Dover Street and bought some potassium bromide and
sal volatile. When he came back Marthe whispered to him:
"She sleeps. She has told me everything as I undressed her. The poor
child!"