While dressing, she heard him walking up and down the corridor;

occasionally they exchanged a few words. Before leaving, Sophia pulled

off the paper from one of the key-holes of the sealed suite of rooms,

and they peered through, one after the other, and saw the green glow of

the sulphur, and were troubled by its uncanniness. And then Sophia

refixed the paper.

In descending the stairs of the house she felt the infirmity of her

knees; but in other respects, though she had been out only once before

since her illness, she was conscious of a sufficient strength. A

disinclination for any enterprise had prevented her from taking the air

as she ought to have done, but within the flat she had exercised her

limbs in many small tasks. The little Chirac, nervously active and

restless, wanted to take her arm, but she would not allow it.

The concierge and part of her family stared curiously at Sophia as she

passed under the archway, for the course of her illness had excited the

interest of the whole house. Just as the carriage was driving off, the

concierge came across the pavement and paid her compliments, and then

said:

"You do not know by hazard why Madame Foucault has not returned for

lunch, madame?"

"Returned for lunch!" said Sophia. "She will not come back till

to-morrow."

The concierge made a face. "Ah! How curious it is! She told my husband

that she would return in two hours. It is very grave! Question of

business."

"I know nothing, madame," said Sophia. She and Chirac looked at each

other. The concierge murmured thanks and went off muttering

indistinctly.

The fiacre turned down the Rue Laferriere, the horse slipping and

sliding as usual over the cobblestones. Soon they were on the

boulevard, making for the Champs Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne.

The fresh breeze and bright sunshine and the large freedom of the

streets quickly intoxicated Sophia--intoxicated her, that is to say, in

quite a physical sense. She was almost drunk, with the heady savour of

life itself. A mild ecstasy of well-being overcame her. She saw the

flat as a horrible, vile prison, and blamed herself for not leaving it

sooner and oftener. The air was medicine, for body and mind too. Her

perspective was instantly corrected. She was happy, living neither in

the past nor in the future, but in and for that hour. And beneath her

happiness moved a wistful melancholy for the Sophia who had suffered

such a captivity and such woes. She yearned for more and yet more

delight, for careless orgies of passionate pleasure, in the midst of

which she would forget all trouble. Why had she refused the offer of

Laurence? Why had she not rushed at once into the splendid fire of

joyous indulgence, ignoring everything but the crude, sensuous

instinct? Acutely aware as she was of her youth, her beauty, and her

charm, she wondered at her refusal. She did not regret her refusal. She

placidly observed it as the result of some tremendously powerful motive

in herself, which could not be questioned or reasoned with--which was,

in fact, the essential HER.

"Do I look like an invalid?" she asked, leaning back luxuriously in the

carriage among the crowd of other vehicles.

Chirac hesitated. "My faith! Yes!" he said at length. "But it becomes

you. If I did not know that you have little love for compliments, I--"

"But I adore compliments!" she exclaimed. "What made you think that?"

"Well, then," he youthfully burst out, "you are more ravishing than

ever."

She gave herself up deliciously to his admiration.

After a silence, he said: "Ah! if you knew how disquieted I was about

you, away there...! I should not know how to tell you. Veritably

disquieted, you comprehend! What could I do? Tell me a little about

your illness."

She recounted details.

As the fiacre entered the Rue Royale, they noticed a crowd of people in

front of the Madeleine shouting and cheering.

The cabman turned towards them. "It appears there has been a victory!"

he said.

"A victory! If only it was true!" murmured Chirac, cynically.

In the Rue Royale people were running frantically to and fro, laughing

and gesticulating in glee. The customers in the cafes stood on their

chairs, and even on tables, to watch, and occasionally to join in, the

sudden fever. The fiacre was slowed to a walking pace. Flags and

carpets began to show from the upper storeys of houses. The crowd grew

thicker and more febrile. "Victory! Victory!" rang hoarsely, shrilly,

and hoarsely again in the air.

"My God!" said Chirac, trembling. "It must be a true victory! We are

saved! We are saved! ... Oh yes, it is true!"

"But naturally it is true! What are you saying?" demanded the driver.

At the Place de la Concorde the fiacre had to stop altogether. The

immense square was a sea of white hats and flowers and happy faces,

with carriages anchored like boats on its surface. Flag after flag

waved out from neighbouring roofs in the breeze that tempered the

August sun. Then hats began to go up, and cheers rolled across the

square like echoes of firing in an enclosed valley. Chirac's driver

jumped madly on to his seat, and cracked his whip.

"Vive la France!" he bawled with all the force of his lungs.

A thousand throats answered him.

Then there was a stir behind them. Another carriage was being slowly

forced to the front. The crowd was pushing it, and crying,

"Marseillaise! Marseillaise!" In the carriage was a woman alone; not

beautiful, but distinguished, and with the assured gaze of one who is

accustomed to homage and multitudinous applause.

"It is Gueymard!" said Chirac to Sophia. He was very pale. And he too

shouted, "Marseillaise!" All his features were distorted.

The woman rose and spoke to her coachman, who offered his hand and she

climbed to the box seat, and stood on it and bowed several times.

"Marseillaise!" The cry continued. Then a roar of cheers, and then

silence spread round the square like an inundation. And amid this

silence the woman began to sing the Marseillaise. As she sang, the

tears ran down her cheeks. Everybody in the vicinity was weeping or

sternly frowning. In the pauses of the first verse could be heard the

rattle of horses' bits, or a whistle of a tug on the river. The

refrain, signalled by a proud challenging toss of Gueymard's head,

leapt up like a tropical tempest, formidable, overpowering. Sophia, who

had had no warning of the emotion gathering within her, sobbed

violently. At the close of the hymn Gueymard's carriage was assaulted

by worshippers. All around, in the tumult of shouting, men were kissing

and embracing each other; and hats went up continually in fountains.

Chirac leaned over the side of the carriage and wrung the hand of a man

who was standing by the wheel.

"Who is that?" Sophia asked, in an unsteady voice, to break the

inexplicable tension within her.

"I don't know," said Chirac. He was weeping like a child. And he sang

out: "Victory! To Berlin! Victory!"

V

Sophia walked alone, with tired limbs, up the damaged oak stairs to the

flat. Chirac had decided that, in the circumstances of the victory, he

would do well to go to the offices of his paper rather earlier than

usual. He had brought her back to the Rue Breda. They had taken leave

of each other in a sort of dream or general enchantment due to their

participation in the vast national delirium which somehow dominated

individual feelings. They did not define their relations. They had been

conscious only of emotion.

The stairs, which smelt of damp even in summer, disgusted Sophia. She

thought of the flat with horror and longed for green places and luxury.

On the landing were two stoutish, ill-dressed men, of middle age,

apparently waiting. Sophia found her key and opened the door.

"Pardon, madame!" said one of the men, raising his hat, and they both

pushed into the flat after her. They stared, puzzled, at the strips of

paper pasted on the doors.

"What do you want?" she asked haughtily. She was very frightened. The

extraordinary interruption brought her down with a shock to the scale

of the individual.

"I am the concierge," said the man who had addressed her. He had the

air of a superior artisan. "It was my wife who spoke to you this

afternoon. This," pointing to his companion, "this is the law. I regret

it, but ..."

The law saluted and shut the front door. Like the concierge, the law

emitted an odour--the odour of uncleanliness on a hot August day.

"The rent?" exclaimed Sophia.

"No, madame, not the rent: the furniture!"

Then she learnt the history of the furniture. It had belonged to the

concierge, who had acquired it from a previous tenant and sold it on

credit to Madame Foucault. Madame Foucault had signed bills and had not

met them. She had made promises and broken them. She had done

everything except discharge her liabilities. She had been warned and

warned again. That day had been fixed as the last limit, and she had

solemnly assured her creditor that on that day she would pay. On

leaving the house she had stated precisely and clearly that she would

return before lunch with all the money. She had made no mention of a

sick father.

Sophia slowly perceived the extent of Madame Foucault's duplicity and

moral cowardice. No doubt the sick father was an invention. The woman,

at the end of a tether which no ingenuity of lies could further

lengthen, had probably absented herself solely to avoid the pain of

witnessing the seizure. She would do anything, however silly, to avoid

an immediate unpleasantness. Or perhaps she had absented herself

without any particular aim, but simply in the hope that something

fortunate might occur. Perhaps she had hoped that Sophia, taken

unawares, would generously pay. Sophia smiled grimly.

"Well," she said. "I can't do anything. I suppose you must do what you

have to do. You will let me pack up my own affairs?"

"Perfectly, madame!"

She warned them as to the danger of opening the sealed rooms. The man

of the law seemed prepared to stay in the corridor indefinitely. No

prospect of delay disturbed him.

Strange and disturbing, the triumph of the concierge! He was a

locksmith by trade. He and his wife and their children lived in two

little dark rooms by the archway--an insignificant fragment of the

house. He was away from home about fourteen hours every day, except

Sundays, when he washed the courtyard. All the other duties of the

concierge were performed by the wife. The pair always looked poor,

untidy, dirty, and rather forlorn. But they were steadily levying toll

on everybody in the big house. They amassed money in forty ways. They

lived for money, and all men have what they live for. With what

arrogant gestures Madame Foucault would descend from a carriage at the

great door! What respectful attitudes and tones the ageing courtesan

would receive from the wife and children of the concierge! But beneath

these conventional fictions the truth was that the concierge held the

whip. At last he was using it. And he had given himself a half-holiday

in order to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious

furniture and the crimson lampshades. This was one of the dramatic

crises in his career as a man of substance. The national thrill of

victory had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the

law. The emotions of the concierge were entirely independent of the

Napoleonic foreign policy.

As Sophia, sick with a sudden disillusion, was putting her things

together, and wondering where she was to go, and whether it would be

politic to consult Chirac, she heard a fluster at the front door:

cries, protestations, implorings. Her own door was thrust open, and

Madame Foucault burst in.

"Save me!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, sinking to the ground.

The feeble theatricality of the gesture offended Sophia's taste. She

asked sternly what Madame Foucault expected her to do. Had not Madame

Foucault knowingly exposed her, without the least warning, to the

extreme annoyance of this visit of the law, a visit which meant

practically that Sophia was put into the street?

"You must not be hard!" Madame Foucault sobbed.

Sophia learnt the complete history of the woman's efforts to pay for

the furniture: a farrago of folly and deceptions. Madame Foucault

confessed too much. Sophia scorned confession for the sake of

confession. She scorned the impulse which forces a weak creature to

insist on its weakness, to revel in remorse, and to find an excuse for

its conduct in the very fact that there is no excuse. She gathered that

Madame Foucault had in fact gone away in the hope that Sophia, trapped,

would pay; and that in the end, she had not even had the courage of her

own trickery, and had run back, driven by panic into audacity, to fall

at Sophia's feet, lest Sophia might not have yielded and the furniture

have been seized. From, beginning to end the conduct of Madame Foucault

had been fatuous and despicable and wicked. Sophia coldly condemned

Madame Foucault for having allowed herself to be brought into the world

with such a weak and maudlin character, and for having allowed herself

to grow old and ugly. As a sight the woman was positively disgraceful.

"Save me!" she exclaimed again. "I did what I could for you!"

Sophia hated her. But the logic of the appeal was irresistible.

"But what can I do?" she asked reluctantly.

"Lend me the money. You can. If you don't, this will be the end for me."

"And a good thing, too!" thought Sophia's hard sense.

"How much is it?" Sophia glumly asked.

"It isn't a thousand francs!" said Madame Foucault with eagerness. "All

my beautiful furniture will go for less than a thousand francs! Save

me!"

She was nauseating Sophia.

"Please rise," said Sophia, her hands fidgeting undecidedly.

"I shall repay you, surely!" Madame Foucault asseverated. "I swear!"

"Does she take me for a fool?" thought Sophia, "with her oaths!"

"No!" said Sophia. "I won't lend you the money. But I tell you what I

will do. I will buy the furniture at that price; and I will promise to

re-sell it to you as soon as you can pay me. Like that, you can be

tranquil. But I have very little money. I must have a guarantee. The

furniture must be mine till you pay me."

"You are an angel of charity!" cried Madame Foucault, embracing

Sophia's skirts. "I will do whatever you wish. Ah! You Englishwomen are

astonishing."

Sophia was not an angel of charity. What she had promised to do

involved sacrifice and anxiety without the prospect of reward. But it

was not charity. It was part of the price Sophia paid for the exercise

of her logical faculty; she paid it unwillingly. 'I did what I could

for you!' Sophia would have died sooner than remind any one of a

benefit conferred, and Madame Foucault had committed precisely that

enormity. The appeal was inexcusable to a fine mind; but it was

effective.

The men were behind the door, listening. Sophia paid out of her stock

of notes. Needless to say, the total was more and not less than a

thousand francs. Madame Foucault grew rapidly confidential with the

man. Without consulting Sophia, she asked the bailiff to draw up a

receipt transferring the ownership of all the furniture to Sophia; and

the bailiff, struck into obligingness by glimpses of Sophia's beauty,

consented to do so. There was much conferring upon forms of words, and

flourishing of pens between thick, vile fingers, and scattering of ink.

Before the men left Madame Foucault uncorked a bottle of wine for them,

and helped them to drink it. Throughout the evening she was

insupportably deferential to Sophia, who was driven to bed. Madame

Foucault contentedly went up to the sixth floor to occupy the servant's

bedroom. She was glad to get so far away from the sulphur, of which a

few faint fumes had penetrated into the corridor.

The next morning, after a stifling night of bad dreams, Sophia was too

ill to get up. She looked round at the furniture in the little room,

and she imagined the furniture in the other rooms, and dismally

thought: "All this furniture is mine. She will never pay me! I am

saddled with it."

It was cheaply bought, but she probably could not sell it for even what

she had paid. Still, the sense of ownership was reassuring.

The charwoman brought her coffee, and Chirac's newspaper; from which

she learnt that the news of the victory which had sent the city mad on

the previous day was utterly false. Tears came into her eyes as she

gazed absently at all the curtained windows of the courtyard. She had

youth and loveliness; according to the rules she ought to have been

irresponsible, gay, and indulgently watched over by the wisdom of

admiring age. But she felt towards the French nation as a mother might

feel towards adorable, wilful children suffering through their own

charming foolishness. She saw France personified in Chirac. How easily,

despite his special knowledge, he had yielded to the fever! Her heart

bled for France and Chirac on that morning of reaction and of truth.

She could not bear to recall the scene in the Place de la Concorde.

Madame Foucault had not descended.

CHAPTER VI

THE SIEGE

I

Madame Foucault came into Sophia's room one afternoon with a peculiar

guilty expression on her large face, and she held her peignoir close to

her exuberant body in folds consciously majestic, as though

endeavouring to prove to Sophia by her carriage that despite her

shifting eyes she was the most righteous and sincere woman that ever

lived.

It was Saturday, the third of September, a beautiful day. Sophia,

suffering from an unimportant relapse, had remained in a state of

inactivity, and had scarcely gone out at all. She loathed the flat, but

lacked the energy to leave it every day. There was no sufficiently

definite object in leaving it. She could not go out and look for health

as she might have looked for flowers. So she remained in the flat, and

stared at the courtyard and the continual mystery of lives hidden

behind curtains that occasionally moved. And the painted yellow walls

of the house, and the papered walls of her room pressed upon her and

crushed her. For a few days Chirac had called daily, animated by the

most adorable solicitude. Then he had ceased to call. She had tired of

reading the journals; they lay unopened. The relations between Madame

Foucault and herself, and her status in the flat of which she now

legally owned the furniture,--these things were left unsettled. But the

question of her board was arranged on the terms that she halved the

cost of food and service with Madame Foucault; her expenses were thus

reduced to the lowest possible--about eighteen francs a week. An idea

hung in the air--like a scientific discovery on the point of being made

by several independent investigators simultaneously--that she and

Madame Foucault should co-operate in order to let furnished rooms at a

remunerative profit. Sophia felt the nearness of the idea and she

wanted to be shocked at the notion of any avowed association between

herself and Madame Foucault; but she could not be.

"Here are a lady and a gentleman who want a bedroom," began Madame

Foucault, "a nice large bedroom, furnished."

"Oh!" said Sophia; "who are they?"

"They will pay a hundred and thirty francs a month, in advance, for the

middle bedroom."

"You've shown it to them already?" said Sophia. And her tone implied

that somehow she was conscious of a right to overlook the affair of

Madame Foucault.

"No," said the other. "I said to myself that first I would ask you for

a counsel."

"Then will they pay all that for a room they haven't seen?"

"The fact is," said Madame Foucault, sheepishly. "The lady has seen the

room before. I know her a little. It is a former tenant. She lived here

some weeks."

"In that room?"

"Oh no! She was poor enough then."

"Where are they?"

"In the corridor. She is very well, the lady. Naturally one must live,

she like all the world; but she is veritably well. Quite respectable!

One would never say ... Then there would be the meals. We could demand

one franc for the cafe au lait, two and a half francs for the lunch,

and three francs for the dinner. Without counting other things. That

would mean over five hundred francs a month, at least. And what would

they cost us? Almost nothing! By what appears, he is a plutocrat ... I

could thus quickly repay you."

"Is it a married couple?"

"Ah! You know, one cannot demand the marriage certificate." Madame

Foucault indicated by a gesture that the Rue Breda was not the paradise

of saints.

"When she came before, this lady, was it with the same man?" Sophia

asked coldly.

"Ah, my faith, no!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, bridling. "It was a bad

sort, the other, a...! Ah, no."

"Why do you ask my advice?" Sophia abruptly questioned, in a hard,

inimical voice. "Is it that it concerns me?"

Tears came at once into the eyes of Madame Foucault. "Do not be

unkind," she implored.

"I'm not unkind," said Sophia, in the same tone.

"Shall you leave me if I accept this offer?"

There was a pause.

"Yes," said Sophia, bluntly. She tried to be large-hearted,

large-minded, and sympathetic; but there was no sign of these qualities

in her speech.

"And if you take with you the furniture which is yours...!"

Sophia kept silence.

"How am I to live, I demand of you?" Madame Foucault asked weakly.

"By being respectable and dealing with respectable people!" said

Sophia, uncompromisingly, in tones of steel.

"I am unhappy!" murmured the elder woman. "However, you are more strong

than I!"

She brusquely dabbed her eyes, gave a little sob, and ran out of the

room. Sophia listened at the door, and heard her dismiss the would-be

tenants of the best bedroom. She wondered that she should possess such

moral ascendancy over the woman, she so young and ingenuous! For, of

course, she had not meant to remove the furniture. She could hear

Madame Foucault sobbing quietly in one of the other rooms; and her lips

curled.

Before evening a truly astonishing event happened. Perceiving that

Madame Foucault showed no signs of bestirring herself, Sophia, with

good nature in her heart but not on her tongue, went to her, and said:

"Shall I occupy myself with the dinner?"

Madame Foucault sobbed more loudly.

"That would be very amiable on your part," Madame Foucault managed at

last to reply, not very articulately.

Sophia put a hat on and went to the grocer's. The grocer, who kept a

busy establishment at the corner of the Rue Clausel, was a middle-aged

and wealthy man. He had sent his young wife and two children to

Normandy until victory over the Prussians should be more assured, and

he asked Sophia whether it was true that there was a good bedroom to

let in the flat where she lived. His servant was ill of smallpox; he

was attacked by anxieties and fears on all sides; he would not enter

his own flat on account of possible infection; he liked Sophia, and

Madame Foucault had been a customer of his, with intervals, for twenty

years. Within an hour he had arranged to rent the middle bedroom at

eighty francs a month, and to take his meals there. The terms were

modest, but the respectability was prodigious. All the glory of this

tenancy fell upon Sophia.

Madame Foucault was deeply impressed. Characteristically she began at

once to construct a theory that Sophia had only to walk out of the

house in order to discover ideal tenants for the rooms. Also she

regarded the advent of the grocer as a reward from Providence for her

self-denial in refusing the profits of sinfulness. Sophia felt

personally responsible to the grocer for his comfort, and so she

herself undertook the preparation of the room. Madame Foucault was

amazed at the thoroughness of her housewifery, and at the ingenuity of

her ideas for the arrangement of furniture. She sat and watched with

admiration sycophantic but real.

That night, when Sophia was in bed, Madame Foucault came into the room,

and dropped down by the side of the bed, and begged Sophia to be her

moral support for ever. She confessed herself generally. She explained

how she had always hated the negation of respectability; how

respectability was the one thing that she had all her life passionately

desired. She said that if Sophia would be her partner in the letting of

furnished rooms to respectable persons, she would obey her in

everything. She gave Sophia a list of all the traits in Sophia's

character which she admired. She asked Sophia to influence her, to

stand by her. She insisted that she would sleep on the sixth floor in

the servant's tiny room; and she had a vision of three bedrooms let to

successful tradesmen. She was in an ecstasy of repentance and good

intentions.

Sophia consented to the business proposition; for she had nothing else

whatever in prospect, and she shared Madame Foucault's rosy view about

the remunerativeness of the bedrooms. With three tenants who took meals

the two women would be able to feed themselves for nothing and still

make a profit on the food; and the rents would be clear gain.

And she felt very sorry for the ageing, feckless Madame Foucault, whose

sincerity was obvious. The association between them would be strange;

it would have been impossible to explain it to St. Luke's Square....

And yet, if there was anything at all in the virtue of Christian

charity, what could properly be urged against the association?

"Ah!" murmured Madame Foucault, kissing Sophia's hands, "it is to-day,

then, that I recommence my life. You will see--you will see! You have

saved me!"

It was a strange sight, the time-worn, disfigured courtesan, half

prostrate before the beautiful young creature proud and unassailable in

the instinctive force of her own character. It was almost a didactic

tableau, fraught with lessons for the vicious. Sophia was happier than

she had been for years. She had a purpose in existence; she had a fluid

soul to mould to her will according to her wisdom; and there was a

large compassion to her credit. Public opinion could not intimidate

her, for in her case there was no public opinion; she knew nobody;

nobody had the right to question her doings.

The next day, Sunday, they both worked hard at the bedrooms from early

morning. The grocer was installed in his chamber, and the two other

rooms were cleansed as they had never been cleansed. At four o'clock,

the weather being more magnificent than ever, Madame Foucault said:

"If we took a promenade on the boulevard?"

Sophia reflected. They were partners. "Very well," she agreed.

The boulevard was crammed with gay, laughing crowds. All the cafes were

full. None, who did not know, could have guessed that the news of Sedan

was scarcely a day old in the capital. Delirious joy reigned in the

glittering sunshine. As the two women strolled along, content with

their industry and their resolves, they came to a National Guard, who,

perched on a ladder, was chipping away the "N" from the official sign

of a court-tradesman. He was exchanging jokes with a circle of open

mouths. It was in this way that Madame Foucault and Sophia learnt of

the establishment of a republic.

"Vive la republique!" cried Madame Foucault, incontinently, and then

apologized to Sophia for the lapse.

They listened a long while to a man who was telling strange histories

of the Empress.

Suddenly Sophia noticed that Madame Foucault was no longer at her

elbow. She glanced about, and saw her in earnest conversation with a

young man whose face seemed familiar. She remembered it was the young

man with whom Madame Foucault had quarrelled on the night when Sophia

found her prone in the corridor; the last remaining worshipper of the

courtesan.

The woman's face was quite changed by her agitation. Sophia drew away,

offended. She watched the pair from a distance for a few moments, and

then, furious in disillusion, she escaped from the fever of the

boulevards and walked quietly home. Madame Foucault did not return.

Apparently Madame Foucault was doomed to be the toy of chance. Two days

later Sophia received a scrawled letter from her, with the information

that her lover had required that she should accompany him to Brussels,

as Paris would soon be getting dangerous. "He adores me always. He is

the most delicious boy. As I have always said, this is the grand

passion of my life. I am happy. He would not permit me to come to you.

He has spent two thousand francs on clothes for me, since naturally I

had nothing." And so on. No word of apology. Sophia, in reading the

letter, allowed for a certain exaggeration and twisting of the truth.

"Young fool! Fool!" she burst out angrily. She did not mean herself;

she meant the fatuous adorer of that dilapidated, horrible woman. She

never saw her again. Doubtless Madame Foucault fulfilled her own

prediction as to her ultimate destiny, but in Brussels.

II

Sophia still possessed about a hundred pounds, and had she chosen to

leave Paris and France, there was nothing to prevent her from doing so.

Perhaps if she had chanced to visit the Gare St. Lazare or the Gare du

Nord, the sight of tens of thousands of people flying seawards might

have stirred in her the desire to flee also from the vague coming

danger. But she did not visit those termini; she was too busy looking

after M. Niepce, her grocer. Moreover, she would not quit her

furniture, which seemed to her to be a sort of rock. With a flat full

of furniture she considered that she ought to be able to devise a

livelihood; the enterprise of becoming independent was already indeed

begun. She ardently wished to be independent, to utilize in her own

behalf the gifts of organization, foresight, commonsense and tenacity

which she knew she possessed and which had lain idle. And she hated the

idea of flight.

Chirac returned as unexpectedly as he had gone; an expedition for his

paper had occupied him. With his lips he urged her to go, but his eyes

spoke differently. He had, one afternoon, a mood of candid despair,

such as he would have dared to show only to one in whom he felt great

confidence. "They will come to Paris," he said; "nothing can stop them.

And ... then...!" He gave a cynical laugh. But when he urged her to go

she said:

"And what about my furniture? And I've promised M. Niepce to look after

him."

Then Chirac informed her that he was without a lodging, and that he

would like to rent one of her rooms. She agreed.

Shortly afterwards he introduced a middle-aged acquaintance named

Carlier, the secretary-general of his newspaper, who wished to rent a

bedroom. Thus by good fortune Sophia let all her rooms immediately, and

was sure of over two hundred francs a month, apart from the profit on

meals supplied. On this latter occasion Chirac (and his companion too)

was quite optimistic, reiterating an absolute certitude that Paris

could never be invested. Briefly, Sophia did not believe him. She

believed the candidly despairing Chirac. She had no information, no

wide theory, to justify her pessimism; nothing but the inward

conviction that the race capable of behaving as she had seen it behave

in the Place de la Concorde, was bound to be defeated. She loved the

French race; but all the practical Teutonic sagacity in her wanted to

take care of it in its difficulties, and was rather angry with it for

being so unfitted to take care of itself.

She let the men talk, and with careless disdain of their discussions

and their certainties she went about her business of preparation. At

this period, overworked and harassed by novel responsibilities and

risks, she was happier, for days together, than she had ever been,

simply because she had a purpose in life and was depending upon

herself. Her ignorance of the military and political situation was

complete; the situation did not interest her. What interested her was

that she had three men to feed wholly or partially, and that the price

of eatables was rising. She bought eatables. She bought fifty pecks of

potatoes at a franc a peck, and another fifty pecks at a franc and a

quarter--double the normal price; ten hams at two and a half francs a

pound; a large quantity of tinned vegetables and fruits, a sack of

flour, rice, biscuits, coffee, Lyons sausage, dried prunes, dried figs,

and much wood and charcoal. But the chief of her purchases was cheese,

of which her mother used to say that bread and cheese and water made a

complete diet. Many of these articles she obtained from her grocer. All

of them, except the flour and the biscuits, she stored in the cellar

belonging to the flat; after several days' delay, for the Parisian

workmen were too elated by the advent of a republic to stoop to labour,

she caused a new lock to be fixed on the cellar-door. Her activities

were the sensation of the house. Everybody admired, but no one imitated.

One morning, on going to do her marketing, she found a notice across

the shuttered windows of her creamery in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette:

"Closed for want of milk." The siege had begun. It was in the closing

of the creamery that the siege was figured for her; in this, and in

eggs at five sous a piece. She went elsewhere for her milk and paid a

franc a litre for it. That evening she told her lodgers that the price

of meals would be doubled, and that if any gentleman thought that he

could get equally good meals elsewhere, he was at liberty to get them

elsewhere. Her position was strengthened by the appearance of another

candidate for a room, a friend of Niepce. She at once offered him her

own room, at a hundred and fifty francs a month.

"You see," she said, "there is a piano in it."

"But I don't play the piano," the man protested, shocked at the price.

"That is not my fault," she said.

He agreed to pay the price demanded for the room because of the

opportunity of getting good meals much cheaper than in the restaurants.

Like M. Niepce, he was a 'siege-widower,' his wife having been put

under shelter in Brittany. Sophia took to the servant's bedroom on the

sixth floor. It measured nine feet by seven, and had no window save a

skylight; but Sophia was in a fair way to realize a profit of at least

four pounds a week, after paying for everything.

On the night when she installed herself in that chamber, amid a world

of domestics and poor people, she worked very late, and the rays of her

candles shot up intermittently through the skylight into a black

heaven; at intervals she flitted up and down the stairs with a candle.

Unknown to her a crowd gradually formed opposite the house in the

street, and at about one o'clock in the morning a file of soldiers woke

the concierge and invaded the courtyard, and every window was suddenly

populated with heads. Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not

a spy signalling to the Prussians. Three quarters of an hour passed

before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of

uniforms and dishevelled curiosity. The childish, impossible unreason

of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of the

reputation of the French people as a sensible race. She was extremely

caustic the next day to her boarders. Except for this episode, the

frequency of military uniforms in the streets, the price of food, and

the fact that at least one house in four was flying either the

ambulance flag or the flag of a foreign embassy (in an absurd hope of

immunity from the impending bombardment) the siege did not exist for

Sophia. The men often talked about their guard-duty, and disappeared

for a day or two to the ramparts, but she was too busy to listen to

them. She thought of nothing but her enterprise, which absorbed all her

powers. She arose at six a.m., in the dark, and by seven-thirty M.

Niepce and his friend had been served with breakfast, and much general

work was already done. At eight o'clock she went out to market. When

asked why she continued to buy at a high price, articles of which she

had a store, she would reply: "I am keeping all that till things are

much dearer." This was regarded as astounding astuteness.

On the fifteenth of October she paid the quarter's rent of the flat,

four hundred francs, and was accepted as tenant. Her ears were soon

quite accustomed to the sound of cannon, and she felt that she had

always been a citizeness of Paris, and that Paris had always been

besieged. She did not speculate about the end of the siege; she lived

from day to day. Occasionally she had a qualm of fear, when the firing

grew momentarily louder, or when she heard that battles had been fought

in such and such a suburb. But then she said it was absurd to be afraid

when you were with a couple of million people, all in the same plight

as yourself. She grew reconciled to everything. She even began to like

her tiny bedroom, partly because it was so easy to keep warm (the

question of artificial heat was growing acute in Paris), and partly

because it ensured her privacy. Down in the flat, whatever was done or

said in one room could be more or less heard in all the others, owing

to the prevalence of doors.

Her existence, in the first half of November, had become regular with a

monotony almost absolute. Only the number of meals served to her

boarders varied slightly from day to day. All these repasts, save now

and then one in the evening, were carried into the bedrooms by the

charwoman. Sophia did not allow herself to be seen much, except in the

afternoons. Though Sophia continued to increase her prices, and was now

selling her stores at an immense profit, she never approached the

prices current outside. She was very indignant against the exploitation

of Paris by its shopkeepers, who had vast supplies of provender, and

were hoarding for the rise. But the force of their example was too

great for her to ignore it entirely; she contented herself with about

half their gains. Only to M. Niepce did she charge more than to the

others, because he was a shopkeeper. The four men appreciated their

paradise. In them developed that agreeable feeling of security which

solitary males find only under the roof of a landlady who is at once

prompt, honest, and a votary of cleanliness. Sophia hung a slate near

the frontdoor, and on this slate they wrote their requests for meals,

for being called, for laundry-work, etc. Sophia never made a mistake,

and never forgot. The perfection of the domestic machine amazed these

men, who had been accustomed to something quite different, and who

every day heard harrowing stories of discomfort and swindling from

their acquaintances. They even admired Sophia for making them pay, if

not too high, still high. They thought it wonderful that she should

tell them the price of all things in advance, and even show them how to

avoid expense, particularly in the matter of warmth. She arranged rugs

for each of them, so that they could sit comfortably in their rooms

with nothing but a small charcoal heater for the hands. Quite naturally

they came to regard her as the paragon and miracle of women. They

endowed her with every fine quality. According to them there had never

been such a woman in the history of mankind; there could not have been!

She became legendary among their friends: a young and elegant creature,

surpassingly beautiful, proud, queenly, unapproachable, scarcely

visible, a marvellous manager, a fine cook and artificer of strange

English dishes, utterly reliable, utterly exact and with habits of

order...! They adored the slight English accent which gave a touch of

the exotic to her very correct and freely idiomatic French. In short,

Sophia was perfect for them, an impossible woman. Whatever she did was

right.

And she went up to her room every night with limbs exhausted, but with

head clear enough to balance her accounts and go through her money. She

did this in bed with thick gloves on. If often she did not sleep well,

it was not because of the distant guns, but because of her

preoccupation with the subject of finance. She was making money, and

she wanted to make more. She was always inventing ways of economy. She

was so anxious to achieve independence that money was always in her

mind. She began to love gold, to love hoarding it, and to hate paying

it away.

One morning her charwoman, who by good fortune was nearly as precise as

Sophia herself, failed to appear. When the moment came for serving M.

Niepce's breakfast, Sophia hesitated, and then decided to look after

the old man personally. She knocked at his door, and went boldly in

with the tray and candle. He started at seeing her; she was wearing a

blue apron, as the charwoman did, but there could be no mistaking her

for the charwoman. Niepce looked older in bed than when dressed. He had

a rather ridiculous, undignified appearance, common among old men

before their morning toilette is achieved; and a nightcap did not

improve it. His rotund paunch lifted the bedclothes, upon which, for

the sake of extra warmth, he had spread unmajestic garments. Sophia

smiled to herself; but the contempt implied by that secret smile was

softened by the thought: "Poor old man!" She told him briefly that she

supposed the charwoman to be ill. He coughed and moved nervously. His

benevolent and simple face beamed on her paternally as she fixed the

tray by the bed.

"I really must open the window for one little second," she said, and

did so. The chill air of the street came through the closed shutters,

and the old man made a noise as of shivering. She pushed back the

shutters, and closed the window, and then did the same with the other

two windows. It was almost day in the room.

"You will no longer need the candle," she said, and came back to the

bedside to extinguish it.

The benign and fatherly old man put his arm round her waist. Fresh from

the tonic of pure air, and with the notion of his ridiculousness still

in her mind, she was staggered for an instant by this gesture. She had

never given a thought to the temperament of the old grocer, the husband

of a young wife. She could not always imaginatively keep in mind the

effect of her own radiance, especially under such circumstances. But

after an instant her precocious cynicism, which had slept, sprang up.

"Naturally! I might have expected it!" she thought with blasting scorn.

"Take away your hand!" she said bitterly to the amiable old fool. She

did not stir.

He obeyed, sheepishly.

"Do you wish to remain with me?" she asked, and as he did not

immediately answer, she said in a most commanding tone: "Answer, then!"

"Yes," he said feebly.

"Well, behave properly."

She went towards the door.

"I wished only--" he stammered.

"I do not wish to know what you wished," she said.

Afterwards she wondered how much of the incident had been overheard.

The other breakfasts she left outside the respective doors; and in

future Niepce's also.

The charwoman never came again. She had caught smallpox and she died of

it, thus losing a good situation. Strange to say, Sophia did not

replace her; the temptation to save her wages and food was too strong.

She could not, however, stand waiting for hours at the door of the

official baker and the official butcher, one of a long line of frozen

women, for the daily rations of bread and tri-weekly rations of meat.

She employed the concierge's boy, at two sous an hour, to do this.

Sometimes he would come in with his hands so blue and cold that he

could scarcely hold the precious cards which gave the right to the

rations and which cost Chirac an hour or two of waiting at the mayoral

offices each week. Sophia might have fed her flock without resorting to

the official rations, but she would not sacrifice the economy which

they represented. She demanded thick clothes for the concierge's boy,

and received boots from Chirac, gloves from Carlier, and a great

overcoat from Niepce. The weather increased in severity, and provisions

in price. One day she sold to the wife of a chemist who lived on the

first floor, for a hundred and ten francs, a ham for which she had paid

less than thirty francs. She was conscious of a thrill of joy in

receiving a beautiful banknote and a gold coin in exchange for a mere

ham. By this time her total cash resources had grown to nearly five

thousand francs. It was astounding. And the reserves in the cellar were

still considerable, and the sack of flour that encumbered the kitchen

was still more than half full. The death of the faithful charwoman,

when she heard of it, produced but little effect on Sophia, who was so

overworked and so completely absorbed in her own affairs that she had

no nervous energy to spare for sentimental regrets. The charwoman, by

whose side she had regularly passed many hours in the kitchen, so that

she knew every crease in her face and fold of her dress, vanished out

of Sophia's memory.

Sophia cleaned and arranged two of the bedrooms in the morning, and two

in the afternoon. She had stayed in hotels where fifteen bedrooms were

in charge of a single chambermaid, and she thought it would be hard if

she could not manage four in the intervals of cooking and other work!

This she said to herself by way of excuse for not engaging another

charwoman. One afternoon she was rubbing the brass knobs of the

numerous doors in M. Niepce's room, when the grocer unexpectedly came

in.

She glanced at him sharply. There was a self-conscious look in his eye.

He had entered the flat noiselessly. She remembered having told him, in

response to a question, that she now did his room in the afternoon. Why

should he have left his shop? He hung up his hat behind the door, with

the meticulous care of an old man. Then he took off his overcoat and

rubbed his hands.

"You do well to wear gloves, madame," he said. "It is dog's weather."

"I do not wear them for the cold," she replied. "I wear them so as not

to spoil my hands."

"Ah! truly! Very well! Very well! May I demand some wood? Where shall I

find it? I do not wish to derange you."

She refused his help, and brought wood from the kitchen, counting the

logs audibly before him.

"Shall I light the fire now?" she asked.

"I will light it," he said.

"Give me a match, please."

As she was arranging the wood and paper, he said: "Madame, will you

listen to me?"

"What is it?"

"Do not be angry," he said. "Have I not proved that I am capable of

respecting you? I continue in that respect. It is with all that respect

that I say to you that I love you, madame.... No, remain calm, I

implore you!" The fact was that Sophia showed no sign of not remaining

calm. "It is true that I have a wife. But what do you wish...? She is

far away. I love you madly," he proceeded with dignified respect. "I

know I am old; but I am rich. I understand your character. You are a

lady, you are decided, direct, sincere, and a woman of business. I have

the greatest respect for you. One can talk to you as one could not to

another woman. You prefer directness and sincerity. Madame, I will give

you two thousand francs a month, and all you require from my shop, if

you will be amiable to me. I am very solitary, I need the society of a

charming creature who would be sympathetic. Two thousand francs a

month. It is money."

He wiped his shiny head with his hand.

Sophia was bending over the fire. She turned her head towards him.

"Is that all?" she said quietly.

"You could count on my discretion," he said in a low voice. "I

appreciate your scruples. I would come, very late, to your room on the

sixth. One could arrange ... You see, I am direct, like you."

She had an impulse to order him tempestuously out of the flat; but it

was not a genuine impulse. He was an old fool. Why not treat him as

such? To take him seriously would be absurd. Moreover, he was a very

remunerative boarder.

"Do not be stupid," she said with cruel tranquillity. "Do not be an old

fool."

And the benign but fatuous middle-aged lecher saw the enchanting vision

of Sophia, with her natty apron and her amusing gloves, sweep and fade

from the room. He left the house, and the expensive fire warmed an

empty room.

Sophia was angry with him. He had evidently planned the proposal. If

capable of respect, he was evidently also capable of chicane. But she

supposed these Frenchmen were all alike: disgusting; and decided that

it was useless to worry over a universal fact. They had simply no

shame, and she had been very prudent to establish herself far away on

the sixth floor. She hoped that none of the other boarders had

overheard Niepce's outrageous insolence. She was not sure if Chirac was

not writing in his room.

That night there was no sound of cannon in the distance, and Sophia for

some time was unable to sleep. She woke up with a start, after a doze,

and struck a match to look at her watch. It had stopped. She had

forgotten to wind it up, which omission indicated that the grocer had

perturbed her more than she thought. She could not be sure how long she

had slept. The hour might be two o'clock or it might be six o'clock.

Impossible for her to rest! She got up and dressed (in case it should

be as late as she feared) and crept down the interminable creaking

stairs with the candle. As she descended, the conviction that it was

the middle of the night grew upon her, and she stepped more softly.

There was no sound save that caused by her footfalls. With her latchkey

she cautiously opened the front door of the flat and entered. She could

then hear the noisy ticking of the small, cheap clock in the kitchen.

At the same moment another door creaked, and Chirac, with hair all

tousled, but fully dressed, appeared in the corridor.

"So you have decided to sell yourself to him!" Chirac whispered.

She drew away instinctively, and she could feel herself blushing. She

was at a loss. She saw that Chirac was in a furious rage, tremendously

moved. He crept towards her, half crouching. She had never seen

anything so theatrical as his movement, and the twitching of his face.

She felt that she too ought to be theatrical, that she ought nobly to

scorn his infamous suggestion, his unwarrantable attack. Even supposing

that she had decided to sell herself to the old pasha, did that concern

him? A dignified silence, an annihilating glance, were all that he

deserved. But she was not capable of this heroic behaviour.

"What time is it?" she added weakly.

"Three o'clock," Chirac sneered.

"I forgot to wind up my watch," she said. "And so I came down to see."

"In effect!" He spoke sarcastically, as if saying: "I've waited for

you, and here you are."

She said to herself that she owed him nothing, but all the time she

felt that he and she were the only young people in that flat, and that

she did owe to him the proof that she was guiltless of the supreme

dishonour of youth. She collected her forces and looked at him.

"You should be ashamed," she said. "You will wake the others."

"And M. Niepce--will he need to be wakened?"

"M. Niepce is not here," she said.

Niepce's door was unlatched. She pushed it open, and went into the

room, which was empty and bore no sign of having been used.

"Come and satisfy yourself!" she insisted.

Chirac did so. His face fell.

She took her watch from her pocket.

"And now wind my watch, and set it, please."

She saw that he was in anguish. He could not take the watch. Tears came

into his eyes. Then he hid his face, and dashed away. She heard a

sob-impeded murmur that sounded like, "Forgive me!" and the banging of

a door. And in the stillness she heard the regular snoring of M.

Carlier. She too cried. Her vision was blurred by a mist, and she

stumbled into the kitchen and seized the clock, and carried it with her

upstairs, and shivered in the intense cold of the night. She wept

gently for a very long time. "What a shame! What a shame!" she said to

herself. Yet she did not quite blame Chirac. The frost drove her into

bed, but not to sleep. She continued to cry. At dawn her eyes were

inflamed with weeping. She was back in the kitchen then. Chirac's door

was wide open. He had left the flat. On the slate was written, "I shall

not take meals to-day."

III

Their relations were permanently changed. For several days they did not

meet at all; and when at the end of the week Chirac was obliged at last

to face Sophia in order to pay his bill, he had a most grievous

expression. It was obvious that he considered himself a criminal

without any defence to offer for his crime. He seemed to make no

attempt to hide his state of mind. But he said nothing. As for Sophia,

she preserved a mien of amiable cheerfulness. She exerted herself to

convince him by her attitude that she bore no resentment, that she had

determined to forget the incident, that in short she was the forgiving

angel of his dreams. She did not, however, succeed entirely in being

quite natural. Confronted by his misery, it would have been impossible

for her to be quite natural, and at the same time quite cheerful!

A little later the social atmosphere of the flat began to grow

querulous, disputatious and perverse. The nerves of everybody were

seriously strained. This applied to the whole city. Days of heavy rains

followed the sharp frosts, and the town was, as it were, sodden with

woe. The gates were closed. And though nine-tenths of the inhabitants

never went outside the gates, the definite and absolute closing of them

demoralized all hearts. Gas was no longer supplied. Rats, cats, and

thorough-bred horses were being eaten and pronounced 'not bad.' The

siege had ceased to be a novelty. Friends did not invite one another to

a 'siege-dinner' as to a picnic. Sophia, fatigued by regular overwork,

became weary of the situation. She was angry with the Prussians for

dilatoriness, and with the French for inaction, and she poured out her

English spleen on her boarders. The boarders told each other in secret

that the patronne was growing formidable. Chiefly she bore a grudge

against the shopkeepers; and when, upon a rumour of peace, the

shop-windows one day suddenly blossomed with prodigious quantities of

all edibles, at highest prices, thus proving that the famine was

artificially created, Sophia was furious. M. Niepce in particular,

though he sold goods to her at a special discount, suffered

indignities. A few days later that benign and fatherly man put himself

lamentably in the wrong by attempting to introduce into his room a

charming young creature who knew how to be sympathetic. Sophia, by an

accident unfortunate for the grocer, caught them in the corridor. She

was beside herself, but the only outward symptoms were a white face and

a cold steely voice that grated like a rasp on the susceptibilities of

the adherents of Aphrodite. At this period Sophia had certainly

developed into a termagant--without knowing it!

She would often insist now on talking about the siege, and hearing

everything that the men could tell her. Her comments, made without the

least regard for the justifiable delicacy of their feelings as

Frenchmen, sometimes led to heated exchanges. When all Montmartre and

the Quartier Breda was impassioned by the appearance from outside of

the Thirty-second battalion, she took the side of the populace, and

would not credit the solemn statement of the journalists, proved by

documents, that these maltreated soldiers were not cowards in flight.

She supported the women who had spit in the faces of the Thirty-second.

She actually said that if she had met them, she would have spit too.

Really, she was convinced of the innocence of the Thirty-second, but

something prevented her from admitting it. The dispute ended with high

words between herself and Chirac.

The next day Chirac came home at an unusual hour, knocked at the

kitchen door, and said:

"I must give notice to leave you."

"Why?" she demanded curtly.

She was kneading flour and water for a potato-cake. Her potato-cakes

were the joy of the household.

"My paper has stopped!" said Chirac.

"Oh!" she added thoughtfully, but not looking at him. "That is no

reason why you should leave."

"Yes," he said. "This place is beyond my means. I do not need to tell

you that in ceasing to appear the paper has omitted to pay its debts.

The house owes me a month's salary. So I must leave."

"No!" said Sophia. "You can pay me when you have money."

He shook his head. "I have no intention of accepting your kindness."

"Haven't you got any money?" she abruptly asked.

"None," said he. "It is the disaster--quite simply!"

"Then you will be forced to get into debt somewhere."

"Yes, but not here! Not to you!"

"Truly, Chirac," she exclaimed, with a cajoling voice, "you are not

reasonable."

"Nevertheless it is like that!" he said with decision.

"Eh, well!" she turned on him menacingly. "It will not be like that!

You understand me? You will stay. And you will pay me when you can.

Otherwise we shall quarrel. Do you imagine I shall tolerate your

childishness? Just because you were angry last night----"

"It is not that," he protested. "You ought to know it is not that."

(She did.) "It is solely that I cannot permit myself to----"

"Enough!" she cried peremptorily, stopping him. And then in a quieter

tone, "And what about Carlier? Is he also in the ditch?"

"Ah! he has money," said Chirac, with sad envy.

"You also, one day," said she. "You stop--in any case until after

Christmas, or we quarrel. Is it agreed?" Her accent had softened.

"You are too good!" he yielded. "I cannot quarrel with you. But it

pains me to accept--"

"Oh!" she snapped, dropping into the vulgar idiom, "you make me sweat

with your stupid pride. Is it that that you call friendship? Go away

now. How do you wish that I should succeed with this cake while you

station yourself there to distract me?"

IV

But in three days' Chirac, with amazing luck, fell into another

situation, and on the Journal des Debats. It was the Prussians who had

found him a place. The celebrated Payenneville, second greatest

chroniqueur of his time, had caught a cold while doing his duty as a

national guard, and had died of pneumonia. The weather was severe

again; soldiers were being frozen to death at Aubervilliers.

Payenneville's position was taken by another man, whose post was

offered to Chirac. He told Sophia of his good fortune with unconcealed

vanity.

"You with your smile!" she said impatiently. "One can refuse you

nothing!"

She behaved just as though Chirac had disgusted her. She humbled him.

But with his fellow-lodgers his airs of importance as a member of the

editorial staff of the Debats were comical in their ingenuousness. On

the very same day Carlier gave notice to leave Sophia. He was

comparatively rich; but the habits which had enabled him to arrive at

independence in the uncertain vocation of a journalist would not allow

him, while he was earning nothing, to spend a sou more than was

absolutely necessary. He had decided to join forces with a widowed

sister, who was accustomed to parsimony as parsimony is understood in

France, and who was living on hoarded potatoes and wine.

"There!" said Sophia, "you have lost me a tenant!"

And she insisted, half jocularly and half seriously, that Carlier was

leaving because he could not stand Chirac's infantile conceit. The flat

was full of acrimonious words.

On Christmas morning Chirac lay in bed rather late; the newspapers did

not appear that day. Paris seemed to be in a sort of stupor. About

eleven o'clock he came to the kitchen door.

"I must speak with you," he said. His tone impressed Sophia.

"Enter," said she.

He went in, and closed the door like a conspirator. "We must have a

little fete," he said. "You and I."

"Fete!" she repeated. "What an idea! How can I leave?"

If the idea had not appealed to the secrecies of her heart, stirring

desires and souvenirs upon which the dust of time lay thick, she would

not have begun by suggesting difficulties; she would have begun by a

flat refusal.

"That is nothing," he said vigorously. "It is Christmas, and I must

have a chat with you. We cannot chat here. I have not had a true little

chat with you since you were ill. You will come with me to a restaurant

for lunch."

She laughed. "And the lunch of my lodgers?"

"You will serve it a little earlier. We will go out immediately

afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner. It is

quite simple."

She shook her head. "You are mad," she said crossly.

"It is necessary that I should offer you something," he went on

scowling. "You comprehend me? I wish you to lunch with me to-day. I

demand it, and you are not going to refuse me."

He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke fiercely,

bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when insisting that he

should live on credit with her for a while.

"You are very rude," she parried.

"If I am rude, it is all the same to me," he held out uncompromisingly.

"You will lunch with me; I hold to it."

"How can I be dressed?" she protested.

"That does not concern me. Arrange that as you can."

It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner imaginable.

At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily clad,

into the mournful streets. The sky, slate-coloured, presaged snow. The

air was bitterly cold, and yet damp. There were no fiacres in the

little three-cornered place which forms the mouth of the Rue Clausel.

In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up

the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves

in response to the whip-cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an

empty vault. Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that

were open displayed this announcement: "A large selection of cheeses

for New Year's gifts." They laughed.

"Last year at this moment," said Chirac, "I was thinking of only one

thing--the masked ball at the opera. I could not sleep after it. This

year even the churches, are not open. And you?"

She put her lips together. "Do not ask me," she said.

They proceeded in silence.

"We are triste, we others," he said. "But the Prussians, in their

trenches, they cannot be so gay, either! Their families and their

Christmas trees must be lacking to them. Let us laugh!"

The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively than

the lesser streets and squares. There was no life anywhere, scarcely a

sound; not even the sound of cannon. Nobody knew anything; Christmas

had put the city into a lugubrious trance of hopelessness. Chirac took

Sophia's arm across the Place Blanche, and a few yards up the Rue Lepic

he stopped at a small restaurant, famous among the initiated, and known

as "The Little Louis." They entered, descending by two steps into a

confined and sombrely picturesque interior.

Sophia saw that they were expected. Chirac must have paid a previous

visit to the restaurant that morning. Several disordered tables showed

that people had already lunched, and left; but in the corner was a

table for two, freshly laid in the best manner of such restaurants;

that is to say, with a red-and-white checked cloth, and two other

red-and-white cloths, almost as large as the table-cloth, folded as

serviettes and arranged flat on two thick plates between solid steel

cutlery; a salt-cellar, out of which one ground rock-salt by turning a

handle, a pepper-castor, two knife-rests, and two common tumblers. The

phenomena which differentiated this table from the ordinary table were

a champagne bottle and a couple of champagne glasses. Champagne was one

of the few items which had not increased in price during the siege.

The landlord and his wife were eating in another corner, a fat,

slatternly pair, whom no privations of a siege could have emaciated.

The landlord rose. He was dressed as a chef, all in white, with the

sacred cap; but a soiled white. Everything in the place was untidy,

unkempt and more or less unclean, except just the table upon which

champagne was waiting. And yet the restaurant was agreeable,

reassuring. The landlord greeted his customers as honest friends. His

greasy face was honest, and so was the pale, weary, humorous face of

his wife. Chirac saluted her.

"You see," said she, across from the other corner, indicating a bone on

her plate. "This is Diane!"

"Ah! the poor animal!" exclaimed Chirac, sympathetically.

"What would you?" said the landlady. "It cost too dear to feed her. And

she was so mignonne! One could not watch her grow thin!"

"I was saying to my wife," the landlord put in, "how she would have

enjoyed that bone--Diane!" He roared with laughter.

Sophia and the landlady exchanged a curious sad smile at this

pleasantry, which had been re-discovered by the landlord for perhaps

the thousandth time during the siege, but which he evidently regarded

as quite new and original.

"Eh, well!" he continued confidentially to Chirac. "I have found for

you something very good--half a duck." And in a still lower tone: "And

it will not cost you too dear."

No attempt to realize more than a modest profit was ever made in that

restaurant. It possessed a regular clientele who knew the value of the

little money they had, and who knew also how to appreciate sincere and

accomplished cookery. The landlord was the chef, and he was always

referred to as the chef, even by his wife.

"How did you get that?" Chirac asked.

"Ah!" said the landlord, mysteriously. "I have one of my friends, who

comes from Villeneuve St. Georges--refugee, you know. In fine ..." A

wave of the fat hands, suggesting that Chirac should not inquire too

closely.

"In effect!" Chirac commented. "But it is very chic, that!"

"I believe you that it is chic!" said the landlady, sturdily.

"It is charming," Sophia murmured politely.

"And then a quite little salad!" said the landlord.

"But that--that is still more striking!" said Chirac.

The landlord winked. The fact was that the commerce which resulted in

fresh green vegetables in the heart of a beleagured town was notorious.

"And then also a quite little cheese!" said Sophia, slightly imitating

the tone of the landlord, as she drew from the inwardness of her cloak

a small round parcel. It contained a Brie cheese, in fairly good

condition. It was worth at least fifty francs, and it had cost Sophia

less than two francs. The landlady joined the landlord in inspecting

this wondrous jewel. Sophia seized a knife and cut a slice for the

landlady's table.

"Madame is too good!" said the landlady, confused by this noble

generosity, and bearing the gift off to her table as a fox-terrier will

hurriedly seek solitude with a sumptuous morsel. The landlord beamed.

Chirac was enchanted. In the intimate and unaffected cosiness of that

interior the vast, stupefied melancholy of the city seemed to be

forgotten, to have lost its sway.

Then the landlord brought a hot brick for the feet of madame. It was

more an acknowledgment of the slice of cheese than a necessity, for the

restaurant was very warm; the tiny kitchen opened directly into it, and

the door between the two was open; there was no ventilation whatever.

"It is a friend of mine," said the landlord, proudly, in the way of

gossip as he served an undescribed soup, "a butcher in the Faubourg St.

Honore, who has bought the three elephants of the Jardin des Plantes

for twenty-seven thousand francs."

Eyebrows were lifted. He uncorked the champagne.

As she drank the first mouthful (she had long lost her youthful

aversion for wine), Sophia had a glimpse of herself in a tilted mirror

hung rather high on the opposite wall. It was several months since she

had attired herself with ceremoniousness. The sudden unexpected vision

of elegance and pallid beauty pleased her. And the instant effect of

the champagne was to renew in her mind a forgotten conception of the

goodness of life and of the joys which she had so long missed.

V

At half-past two they were alone in the little salon of the restaurant,

and vaguely in their dreamy and feverish minds that were too

preoccupied to control with precision their warm, relaxed bodies, there

floated the illusion that the restaurant belonged to them and that in

it they were at home. It was no longer a restaurant, but a retreat and

shelter from hard life. The chef and his wife were dozing in an inner

room. The champagne was drunk; the adorable cheese was eaten; and they

were sipping Marc de Bourgogne. They sat at right angles to one

another, close to one another, with brains aswing; full of good nature

and quick sympathy; their flesh content and yet expectant. In a pause

of the conversation (which, entirely banal and fragmentary, had seemed

to reach the acme of agreeableness), Chirac put his hand on the hand of

Sophia as it rested limp on the littered table. Accidentally she caught

his eye; she had not meant to do so. They both became self-conscious.

His thin, bearded face had more than ever that wistfulness which always

softened towards him the uncompromisingness of her character. He had

the look of a child. For her, Gerald had sometimes shown the same look.

But indeed she was now one of those women for whom all men, and

especially all men in a tender mood, are invested with a certain

incurable quality of childishness. She had not withdrawn her hand at

once, and so she could not withdraw it at all.

He gazed at her with timid audacity. Her eyes were liquid.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"I was asking myself what I should have done if you had refused to

come."

"And what SHOULD you have done?"

"Assuredly something terribly inconvenient," he replied, with the large

importance of a man who is in the domain of pure supposition. He leaned

towards her. "My very dear friend," he said in a different voice,

getting bolder.

It was infinitely sweet to her, voluptuously sweet, this basking in the

heat of temptation. It certainly did seem to her, then, the one real

pleasure in the world. Her body might have been saying to his: "See how

ready I am!" Her body might have been saying to his: "Look into my

mind. For you I have no modesty. Look and see all that is there." The

veil of convention seemed to have been rent. Their attitude to each

other was almost that of lover and mistress, between whom a single

glance may be charged with the secrets of the past and promises for the

future. Morally she was his mistress in that moment.

He released her hand and put his arm round her waist.

"I love thee," he whispered with great emotion.

Her face changed and hardened. "You must not do that," she said,

coldly, unkindly, harshly. She scowled. She would not abate one crease

in her forehead to the appeal of his surprised glance. Yet she did not

want to repulse him. The instinct which repulsed him was not within her

control. Just as a shy man will obstinately refuse an invitation which

he is hungering to accept, so, though not from shyness, she was

compelled to repulse Chirac. Perhaps if her desires had not been laid

to sleep by excessive physical industry and nervous strain, the sequel

might have been different.

Chirac, like most men who have once found a woman weak, imagined that

he understood women profoundly. He thought of women as the Occidental

thinks of the Chinese, as a race apart, mysterious but capable of being

infallibly comprehended by the application of a few leading principles

of psychology. Moreover he was in earnest; he was hard driven, and he

was honest. He continued, respectfully obedient in withdrawing his arm:

"Very dear friend," he urged with undaunted confidence, "you must know

that I love you."

She shook her head impatiently, all the time wondering what it was that

prevented her from slipping into his arms. She knew that she was

treating him badly by this brusque change of front; but she could not

help it. Then she began to feel sorry for him.

"We have been very good friends," he said. "I have always admired you

enormously. I did not think that I should dare to love you until that

day when I overheard that old villain Niepce make his advances. Then,

when I perceived my acute jealousy, I knew that I was loving you. Ever

since, I have thought only of you. I swear to you that if you will not

belong to me, it is already finished for me! Altogether! Never have I

seen a woman like you! So strong, so proud, so kind, and so beautiful!

You are astonishing, yes, astonishing! No other woman could have drawn

herself out of an impossible situation as you have done, since the

disappearance of your husband. For me, you are a woman unique. I am

very sincere. Besides, you know it ... Dear friend!"

She shook her head passionately.

She did not love him. But she was moved. And she wanted to love him.

She wanted to yield to him, only liking him, and to love afterwards.

But this obstinate instinct held her back. "I do not say, now," Chirac

went on. "Let me hope."

The Latin theatricality of his gestures and his tone made her sorrowful

for him.

"My poor Chirac!" she plaintively murmured, and began to put on her

gloves.

"I shall hope!" he persisted.

She pursed her lips. He seized her violently by the waist. She drew her

face away from his, firmly. She was not hard, not angry now.

Disconcerted by her compassion, he loosed her.

"My poor Chirac," she said, "I ought not to have come. I must go. It is

perfectly useless. Believe me."

"No, no!" he whispered fiercely.

She stood up and the abrupt movement pushed the table gratingly across

the floor. The throbbing spell of the flesh was snapped like a

stretched string, and the scene over. The landlord, roused from his

doze, stumbled in. Chirac had nothing but the bill as a reward for his

pains. He was baffled.

They left the restaurant, silently, with a foolish air.

Dusk was falling on the mournful streets, and the lamp-lighters were

lighting the miserable oil lamps that had replaced gas. They two, and

the lamplighters, and an omnibus were alone in the streets. The gloom

was awful; it was desolating. The universal silence seemed to be the

silence of despair. Steeped in woe, Sophia thought wearily upon the

hopeless problem of existence. For it seemed to her that she and Chirac

had created this woe out of nothing, and yet it was an incurable woe!

CHAPTER VII

SUCCESS

I

Sophia lay awake one night in the room lately quitted by Carlier. That

silent negation of individuality had come and gone, and left scarcely

any record of himself either in his room or in the memories of those

who had surrounded his existence in the house. Sophia had decided to

descend from the sixth floor, partly because the temptation of a large

room, after months in a cubicle, was rather strong; but more because of

late she had been obliged to barricade the door of the cubicle with a

chest of drawers, owing to the propensities of a new tenant of the

sixth floor. It was useless to complain to the concierge; the sole

effective argument was the chest of drawers, and even that was frailer

than Sophia could have wished. Hence, finally, her retreat.

She heard the front-door of the flat open; then it was shut with

nervous violence. The resonance of its closing would have certainly

wakened less accomplished sleepers than M. Niepce and his friend, whose

snores continued with undisturbed regularity. After a pause of

shuffling, a match was struck, and feet crept across the corridor with

the most exaggerated precautions against noise. There followed the

unintentional bang of another door. It was decidedly the entry of a man

without the slightest natural aptitude for furtive irruptions. The

clock in M. Niepce's room, which the grocer had persuaded to exact

time-keeping, chimed three with its delicate ting.

For several days past Chirac had been mysteriously engaged very late at

the bureaux of the Debats. No one knew the nature of his employment; he

said nothing, except to inform Sophia that he would continue to come

home about three o'clock until further notice. She had insisted on

leaving in his room the materials and apparatus for a light meal.

Naturally he had protested, with the irrational obstinacy of a

physically weak man who sticks to it that he can defy the laws of

nature. But he had protested in vain.

His general conduct since Christmas Day had frightened Sophia, in spite

of her tendency to stifle facile alarms at their birth. He had eaten

scarcely anything at all, and he went about with the face of a man

dying of a broken heart. The change in him was indeed tragic. And

instead of improving, he grew worse. "Have I done this?" Sophia asked

herself. "It is impossible that I should have done this! It is absurd

and ridiculous that he should behave so!" Her thoughts were employed

alternately in sympathizing with him and in despising him, in blaming

herself and in blaming him. When they spoke, they spoke awkwardly, as

though one or both of them had committed a shameful crime, which could

not even be mentioned. The atmosphere of the flat was tainted by the

horror. And Sophia could not offer him a bowl of soup without wondering

how he would look at her or avoid looking, and without carefully

arranging in advance her own gestures and speech. Existence was a

nightmare of self-consciousness.

"At last they have unmasked their batteries!" he had exclaimed with

painful gaiety two days after Christmas, when the besiegers had

recommenced their cannonade. He tried to imitate the strange, general

joy of the city, which had been roused from apathy by the recurrence of

a familiar noise; but the effort was a deplorable failure. And Sophia

condemned not merely the failure of Chirac's imitation, but the thing

imitated. "Childish!" she thought. Yet, despise the feebleness of

Chirac's behaviour as she might, she was deeply impressed, genuinely

astonished, by the gravity and persistence of the symptoms. "He must

have been getting himself into a state about me for a long time," she

thought. "Surely he could not have gone mad like this all in a day or

two! But I never noticed anything. No; honestly I never noticed

anything!" And just as her behaviour in the restaurant had shaken

Chirac's confidence in his knowledge of the other sex, so now the

singular behaviour of Chirac shook hers. She was taken aback. She was

frightened, though she pretended not to be frightened.

She had lived over and over again the scene in the restaurant. She

asked herself over and over again if really she had not beforehand

expected him to make love to her in the restaurant. She could not

decide exactly when she had begun to expect a declaration; but probably

a long time before the meal was finished. She had foreseen it, and

might have stopped it. But she had not chosen to stop it. Curiosity

concerning not merely him, but also herself, had tempted her tacitly to

encourage him. She asked herself over and over again why she had

repulsed him. It struck her as curious that she had repulsed him. Was

it because she was a married woman? Was it because she had moral

scruples? Was it at bottom because she did not care for him? Was it

because she could not care for anybody? Was it because his fervid

manner of love-making offended her English phlegm? And did she feel

pleased or displeased by his forbearance in not renewing the assault?

She could not answer. She did not know.

But all the time she knew that she wanted love. Only, she conceived a

different kind of love: placid, regular, somewhat stern, somewhat above

the plane of whims, moods, caresses, and all mere fleshly contacts. Not

that she considered that she despised these things (though she did)!

What she wanted was a love that was too proud, too independent, to

exhibit frankly either its joy or its pain. She hated a display of

sentiment. And even in the most intimate abandonments she would have

made reserves, and would have expected reserves, trusting to a lover's

powers of divination, and to her own! The foundation of her character

was a haughty moral independence, and this quality was what she most

admired in others.

Chirac's inability to draw from his own pride strength to sustain

himself against the blow of her refusal gradually killed in her the

sexual desire which he had aroused, and which during a few days

flickered up under the stimulus of fancy and of regret. Sophia saw with

increasing clearness that her unreasoning instinct had been right in

saying him nay. And when, in spite of this, regrets still visited her,

she would comfort herself in thinking: "I cannot be bothered with all

that sort of thing. It is not worth while. What does it lead to? Is not

life complicated enough without that? No, no! I will stay as I am. At

any rate I know what I am in for, as things are!" And she would reflect

upon her hopeful financial situation, and the approaching prospect of a

constantly sufficient income. And a little thrill of impatience against

the interminable and gigantic foolishness of the siege would take her.

But her self-consciousness in presence of Chirac did not abate.

As she lay in bed she awaited accustomed sounds which should have

connoted Chirac's definite retirement for the night. Her ear, however,

caught no sound whatever from his room. Then she imagined that there

was a smell of burning in the flat. She sat up, and sniffed anxiously,

of a sudden wideawake and apprehensive. And then she was sure that the

smell of burning was not in her imagination. The bedroom was in perfect

darkness. Feverishly she searched with her right hand for the matches

on the night-table, and knocked candlestick and matches to the floor.

She seized her dressing-gown, which was spread over the bed, and put it

on, aiming for the door. Her feet were bare. She discovered the door.

In the passage she could discern nothing at first, and then she made

out a thin line of light, which indicated the bottom of Chirac's door.

The smell of burning was strong and unmistakable. She went towards the

faint light, fumbled for the door-handle with her palm, and opened. It

did not occur to her to call out and ask what was the matter.

The house was not on fire; but it might have been. She had left on the

table at the foot of Chirac's bed a small cooking-lamp, and a saucepan

of bouillon. All that Chirac had to do was to ignite the lamp and put

the saucepan on it. He had ignited the lamp, having previously raised

the double wicks, and had then dropped into the chair by the table just

as he was, and sunk forward and gone to sleep with his head lying

sideways on the table. He had not put the saucepan on the lamp; he had

not lowered the wicks, and the flames, capped with thick black smoke,

were waving slowly to and fro within a few inches of his loose hair.

His hat had rolled along the floor; he was wearing his great overcoat

and one woollen glove; the other glove had lodged on his slanting knee.

A candle was also burning.

Sophia hastened forward, as it were surreptitiously, and with a

forward-reaching movement turned down the wicks of the lamp; black

specks were falling on the table; happily the saucepan was covered, or

the bouillon would have been ruined.

Chirac made a heart-rending spectacle, and Sophia was aware of deep and

painful emotion in seeing him thus. He must have been utterly exhausted

and broken by loss of sleep. He was a man incapable of regular hours,

incapable of treating his body with decency. Though going to bed at

three o'clock, he had continued to rise at his usual hour. He looked

like one dead; but more sad, more wistful. Outside in the street a fog

reigned, and his thin draggled beard was jewelled with the moisture of

it. His attitude had the unconsidered and violent prostration of an

overspent dog. The beaten animal in him was expressed in every detail

of that posture. It showed even in his white, drawn eyelids, and in the

falling of a finger. All his face was very sad. It appealed for mercy

as the undefended face of sleep always appeals; it was so helpless, so

exposed, so simple. It recalled Sophia to a sense of the inner

mysteries of life, reminding her somehow that humanity walks ever on a

thin crust over terrific abysses. She did not physically shudder; but

her soul shuddered.

She mechanically placed the saucepan on the lamp, and the noise

awakened Chirac. He groaned. At first he did not perceive her. When he

saw that some one was looking down at him, he did not immediately

realize who this some one was. He rubbed his eyes with his fists,

exactly like a baby, and sat up, and the chair cracked.

"What then?" he demanded. "Oh, madame, I ask pardon. What?"

"You have nearly destroyed the house," she said. "I smelt fire, and I

came in. I was just in time. There is no danger now. But please be

careful." She made as if to move towards the door.

"But what did I do?" he asked, his eyelids wavering.

She explained.

He rose from his chair unsteadily. She told him to sit down again, and

he obeyed as though in a dream.

"I can go now," she said.

"Wait one moment," he murmured. "I ask pardon. I should not know how to

thank you. You are truly too good. Will you wait one moment?"

His tone was one of supplication. He gazed at her, a little dazzled by

the light and by her. The lamp and the candle illuminated the lower

part of her face, theatrically, and showed the texture of her blue

flannel peignoir; the pattern of a part of the lace collar was

silhouetted in shadow on her cheek. Her face was flushed, and her hair

hung down unconfined. Evidently he could not recover from his excusable

astonishment at the apparition of such a figure in his room.

"What is it--now?" she said. The faint, quizzical emphasis which she

put on the 'now' indicated the essential of her thought. The sight of

him touched her and filled her with a womanly sympathy. But that

sympathy was only the envelope of her disdain of him. She could not

admire weakness. She could but pity it with a pity in which scorn was

mingled. Her instinct was to treat him as a child. He had failed in

human dignity. And it seemed to her as if she had not previously been

quite certain whether she could not love him, but that now she was

quite certain. She was close to him. She saw the wounds of a soul that

could not hide its wounds, and she resented the sight. She was hard.

She would not make allowances. And she revelled in her hardness.

Contempt--a good-natured, kindly, forgiving contempt--that was the

kernel of the sympathy which exteriorly warmed her! Contempt for the

lack of self-control which had resulted in this swift degeneration of a

man into a tortured victim! Contempt for the lack of perspective which

magnified a mere mushroom passion till it filled the whole field of

life! Contempt for this feminine slavery to sentiment! She felt that

she might have been able to give herself to Chirac as one gives a toy

to an infant. But of loving him...! No! She was conscious of an

immeasurable superiority to him, for she was conscious of the freedom

of a strong mind.

"I wanted to tell you," said he, "I am going away."

"Where?" she asked.

"Out of Paris."

"Out of Paris? How?"

"By balloon! My journal...! It is an affair of great importance. You

understand. I offered myself. What would you?"

"It is dangerous," she observed, waiting to see if he would put on the

silly air of one who does not understand fear.

"Oh!" the poor fellow muttered with a fatuous intonation and snapping

of the fingers. "That is all the same to me. Yes, it is dangerous. Yes,

it is dangerous!" he repeated. "But what would you...? For me...!"

She wished that she had not mentioned danger. It hurt her to watch him

incurring her ironic disdain.

"It will be the night after to-morrow," he said. "In the courtyard of

the Gare du Nord. I want you to come and see me go. I particularly want

you to come and see me go. I have asked Carlier to escort you."

He might have been saying, "I am offering myself to martyrdom, and you

must assist at the spectacle."

She despised him yet more.

"Oh! Be tranquil," he said. "I shall not worry you. Never shall I speak

to you again of my love. I know you. I know it would be useless. But I

hope you will come and wish me bon voyage."

"Of course, if you really wish it," she replied with cheerful coolness.

He seized her hand and kissed it.

Once it had pleased her when he kissed her hand. But now she did not

like it. It seemed hysterical and foolish to her. She felt her feet to

be stone-cold on the floor.

"I'll leave you now," she said. "Please eat your soup."

She escaped, hoping he would not espy her feet.

II

The courtyard of the Nord Railway Station was lighted by oil-lamps

taken from locomotives; their silvered reflectors threw dazzling rays

from all sides on the under portion of the immense yellow mass of the

balloon; the upper portion was swaying to and fro with gigantic

ungainliness in the strong breeze. It was only a small balloon, as

balloons are measured, but it seemed monstrous as it wavered over the

human forms that were agitating themselves beneath it. The cordage was

silhouetted against the yellow taffetas as high up as the widest

diameter of the balloon, but above that all was vague, and even

spectators standing at a distance could not clearly separate the summit

of the great sphere from the darkly moving sky. The car, held by ropes

fastened to stakes, rose now and then a few inches uneasily from the

ground. The sombre and severe architecture of the station-buildings

enclosed the balloon on every hand; it had only one way of escape. Over

the roofs of that architecture, which shut out the sounds of the city,

came the irregular booming of the bombardment. Shells were falling in

the southern quarters of Paris, doing perhaps not a great deal of

damage, but still plunging occasionally into the midst of some domestic

interior and making a sad mess of it. The Parisians were convinced that

the shells were aimed maliciously at hospitals and museums; and when a

child happened to be blown to pieces their unspoken comments upon the

Prussian savagery were bitter. Their faces said: "Those barbarians

cannot even spare our children!" They amused themselves by creating a

market in shells, paying more for a live shell than a dead one, and

modifying the tariff according to the supply. And as the cattle-market

was empty, and the vegetable-market was empty, and beasts no longer

pastured on the grass of the parks, and the twenty-five million rats of

the metropolis were too numerous to furnish interest to spectators, and

the Bourse was practically deserted, the traffic in shells sustained

the starving mercantile instinct during a very dull period. But the

effect on the nerves was deleterious. The nerves of everybody were like

nothing but a raw wound. Violent anger would spring up magically out of

laughter, and blows out of caresses. This indirect consequence of the

bombardment was particularly noticeable in the group of men under the

balloon. Each behaved as if he were controlling his temper in the most

difficult circumstances. Constantly they all gazed upwards into the

sky, though nothing could possibly be distinguished there save the

blurred edge of a flying cloud. But the booming came from that sky; the

shells that were dropping on Montrouge came out of that sky; and the

balloon was going up into it; the balloon was ascending into its

mysteries, to brave its dangers, to sweep over the encircling ring of

fire and savages.

Sophia stood apart with Carlier. Carlier had indicated a particular

spot, under the shelter of the colonnade, where he said it was

imperative that they should post themselves. Having guided Sophia to

this spot, and impressed upon her that they were not to move, he seemed

to consider that the activity of his role was finished, and spoke no

word. With the very high silk hat which he always wore, and a thin

old-fashioned overcoat whose collar was turned up, he made a rather

grotesque figure. Fortunately the night was not very cold, or he might

have passively frozen to death on the edge of that feverish group.

Sophia soon ignored him. She watched the balloon. An aristocratic old

man leaned against the car, watch in hand; at intervals he scowled, or

stamped his foot. An old sailor, tranquilly smoking a pipe, walked

round and round the balloon, staring at it; once he climbed up into the

rigging, and once he jumped into the car and angrily threw out of it a

bag, which some one had placed in it. But for the most part he was

calm. Other persons of authority hurried about, talking and

gesticulating; and a number of workmen waited idly for orders.

"Where is Chirac?" suddenly cried the old man with the watch.

Several voices deferentially answered, and a man ran away into the

gloom on an errand.

Then Chirac appeared, nervous, self-conscious, restless. He was

enveloped in a fur coat that Sophia had never seen before, and he

carried dangling in his hand a cage containing six pigeons whose

whiteness stirred uneasily within it. The sailor took the cage from him

and all the persons of authority gathered round to inspect the

wonderful birds upon which, apparently, momentous affairs depended.

When the group separated, the sailor was to be seen bending over the

edge of the car to deposit the cage safely. He then got into the car,

still smoking his pipe, and perched himself negligently on the

wicker-work. The man with the watch was conversing with Chirac; Chirac

nodded his head frequently in acquiescence, and seemed to be saying all

the time: "Yes, sir! Perfectly sir! I understand, sir! Yes, sir!"

Suddenly Chirac turned to the car and put a question to the sailor, who

shook his head. Whereupon Chirac gave a gesture of submissive despair

to the man with the watch. And in an instant the whole throng was in a

ferment.

"The victuals!" cried the man with the watch. "The victuals, name of

God! Must one be indeed an idiot to forget the victuals! Name of

God--of God!"

Sophia smiled at the agitation, and at the inefficient management which

had never thought of food. For it appeared that the food had not merely

been forgotten; it was a question which had not even been considered.

She could not help despising all that crowd of self-important and fussy

males to whom the idea had not occurred that even balloonists must eat.

And she wondered whether everything was done like that. After a delay

that seemed very long, the problem of victuals was solved, chiefly, as

far as Sophia could judge, by means of cakes of chocolate and bottles

of wine.

"It is enough! It is enough!" Chirac shouted passionately several times

to a knot of men who began to argue with him.

Then he gazed round furtively, and with an inflation of the chest and a

patting of his fur coat he came directly towards Sophia. Evidently

Sophia's position had been prearranged between him and Carlier. They

could forget food, but they could think of Sophia's position!

All eyes followed him. Those eyes could not, in the gloom, distinguish

Sophia's beauty, but they could see that she was young and slim and

elegant, and of foreign carriage. That was enough. The very air seemed

to vibrate with the intense curiosity of those eyes. And immediately

Chirac grew into the hero of some brilliant and romantic adventure.

Immediately he was envied and admired by every man of authority

present. What was she? Who was she? Was it a serious passion or simply

a caprice? Had she flung herself at him? It was undeniable that lovely

creatures did sometimes fling themselves at lucky mediocrities. Was she

a married woman? An artiste? A girl? Such queries thumped beneath

overcoats, while the correctness of a ceremonious demeanour was

strictly observed.

Chirac uncovered, and kissed her hand. The wind disarranged his hair.

She saw that his face was very pale and anxious beneath the swagger of

a sincere desire to be brave.

"Well, it is the moment!" he said.

"Did you all forget the food?" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "What will you? One cannot think of

everything."

"I hope you will have a safe voyage," she said.

She had already taken leave of him once, in the house, and heard all

about the balloon and the sailor-aeronaut and the preparations; and now

she had nothing to say, nothing whatever.

He shrugged his shoulders again. "I hope so!" he murmured, but in a

tone to convey that he had no such hope.

"The wind isn't too strong?" she suggested.

He shrugged his shoulders again. "What would you?"

"Is it in the direction you want?"

"Yes, nearly," he admitted unwillingly. Then rousing himself: "Eh,

well, madame. You have been extremely amiable to come. I held to it

very much--that you should come. It is because of you I quit Paris."

She resented the speech by a frown.

"Ah!" he implored in a whisper. "Do not do that. Smile on me. After

all, it is not my fault. Remember that this may be the last time I see

you, the last time I regard your eyes."

She smiled. She was convinced of the genuineness of the emotion which

expressed itself in all this flamboyant behaviour. And she had to make

excuses to herself on behalf of Chirac. She smiled to give him

pleasure. The hard commonsense in her might sneer, but indubitably she

was the centre of a romantic episode. The balloon darkly swinging

there! The men waiting! The secrecy of the mission! And Chirac,

bare-headed in the wind that was to whisk him away, telling her in

fatalistic accents that her image had devastated his life, while

envious aspirants watched their colloquy! Yes, it was romantic. And she

was beautiful! Her beauty was an active reality that went about the

world playing tricks in spite of herself. The thoughts that passed

through her mind were the large, splendid thoughts of romance. And it

was Chirac who had aroused them! A real drama existed, then, triumphing

over the accidental absurdities and pettinesses of the situation. Her

final words to Chirac were tender and encouraging.

He hurried back to the balloon, resuming his cap. He was received with

the respect due to one who comes fresh from conquest. He was sacred.

Sophia rejoined Carlier, who had withdrawn, and began to talk to him

with a self-conscious garrulity. She spoke without reason and scarcely

noticed what she was saying. Already Chirac was snatched out of her

life, as other beings, so many of them, had been snatched. She thought

of their first meetings, and of the sympathy which had always united

them. He had lost his simplicity, now, in the self-created crisis of

his fate, and had sunk in her esteem. And she was determined to like

him all the more because he had sunk in her esteem. She wondered

whether he really had undertaken this adventure from sentimental

disappointment. She wondered whether, if she had not forgotten to wind

her watch one night, they would still have been living quietly under

the same roof in the Rue Breda.

The sailor climbed definitely into the car; he had covered himself with

a large cloak. Chirac had got one leg over the side of the car, and

eight men were standing by the ropes, when a horse's hoofs clattered

through the guarded entrance to the courtyard, amid an uproar of sudden

excitement. The shiny chest of the horse was flecked with the classic

foam.

"A telegram from the Governor of Paris!"

As the orderly, checking his mount, approached the group, even the old

man with the watch raised his hat. The orderly responded, bent down to

make an inquiry, which Chirac answered, and then, with another exchange

of salutes, the official telegram was handed over to Chirac, and the

horse backed away from the crowd. It was quite thrilling. Carlier was

thrilled.

"He is never too prompt, the Governor. It is a quality!" said Carlier,

with irony.

Chirac entered the car. And then the old man with the watch drew a

black bag from the shadow behind him and entrusted it to Chirac, who

accepted it with a profound deference and hid it. The sailor began to

issue commands. The men at the ropes were bending down now. Suddenly

the balloon rose about a foot and trembled. The sailor continued to

shout. All the persons of authority gazed motionless at the balloon.

The moment of suspense was eternal.

"Let go all!" cried the sailor, standing up, and clinging to the

cordage. Chirac was seated in the car, a mass of dark fur with a small

patch of white in it. The men at the ropes were a knot of struggling

confused figures.

One side of the car tilted up, and the sailor was nearly pitched out.

Three men at the other side had failed to free the ropes.

"Let go, corpses!" the sailor yelled at them.

The balloon jumped, as if it were drawn by some terrific impulse from

the skies.

"Adieu!" called Chirac, pulling his cap off and waving it. "Adieu!"

"Bon voyage! Bon voyage!" the little crowd cheered. And then, "Vive la

France!" Throats tightened, including Sophia's.

But the top of the balloon had leaned over, destroying its pear-shape,

and the whole mass swerved violently towards the wall of the station,

the car swinging under it like a toy, and an anchor under the car.

There was a cry of alarm. Then the great ball leaped again, and swept

over the high glass roof, escaping by inches the spouting. The cheers

expired instantly.... The balloon was gone. It was spirited away as if

by some furious and mighty power that had grown impatient in waiting

for it. There remained for a few seconds on the collective retina of

the spectators a vision of the inclined car swinging near the roof like

the tail of a kite. And then nothing! Blankness! Blackness! Already the

balloon was lost to sight in the vast stormy ocean of the night, a

plaything of the winds. The spectators became once more aware of the

dull booming of the cannonade. The balloon was already perhaps flying

unseen amid the wrack over those guns.

Sophia involuntarily caught her breath. A chill sense of loneliness, of

purposelessness, numbed her being.

Nobody ever saw Chirac or the old sailor again. The sea must have

swallowed them. Of the sixty-five balloons that left Paris during the

siege, two were not heard of. This was the first of the two. Chirac

had, at any rate, not magnified the peril, though his intention was

undoubtedly to magnify it.

III

This was the end of Sophia's romantic adventures in France. Soon

afterwards the Germans entered Paris, by mutual agreement, and made a

point of seeing the Louvre, and departed, amid the silence of a city.

For Sophia the conclusion of the siege meant chiefly that prices went

down. Long before supplies from outside could reach Paris, the

shop-windows were suddenly full of goods which had arrived from the

shopkeepers alone knew where. Sophia, with the stock in her cellar,

could have held out for several weeks more, and it annoyed her that she

had not sold more of her good things while good things were worth gold.

The signing of a treaty at Versailles reduced the value of Sophia's two

remaining hams from about five pounds apiece to the usual price of

hams. However, at the end of January she found herself in possession of

a capital of about eight thousand francs, all the furniture of the

flat, and a reputation. She had earned it all. Nothing could destroy

the structure of her beauty, but she looked worn and appreciably older.

She wondered often when Chirac would return. She might have written to

Carlier or to the paper; but she did not. It was Niepce who discovered

in a newspaper that Chirac's balloon had miscarried. At the moment the

news did not affect her at all; but after several days she began to

feel her loss in a dull sort of way; and she felt it more and more,

though never acutely. She was perfectly convinced that Chirac could

never have attracted her powerfully. She continued to dream, at rare

intervals, of the kind of passion that would have satisfied her,

glowing but banked down like a fire in some fine chamber of a rich but

careful household.

She was speculating upon what her future would be, and whether by

inertia she was doomed to stay for ever in the Rue Breda, when the

Commune caught her. She was more vexed than frightened by the Commune;

vexed that a city so in need of repose and industry should indulge in

such antics. For many people the Commune was a worse experience than

the siege; but not for Sophia. She was a woman and a foreigner. Niepce

was infinitely more disturbed than Sophia; he went in fear of his life.

Sophia would go out to market and take her chances. It is true that

during one period the whole population of the house went to live in the

cellars, and orders to the butcher and other tradesmen were given over

the party-wall into the adjoining courtyard, which communicated with an

alley. A strange existence, and possibly perilous! But the women who

passed through it and had also passed through the siege, were not very

much intimidated by it, unless they happened to have husbands or lovers

who were active politicians.

Sophia did not cease, during the greater part of the year 1871, to make

a living and to save money. She watched every sou, and she developed a

tendency to demand from her tenants all that they could pay. She

excused this to herself by ostentatiously declaring every detail of her

prices in advance. It came to the same thing in the end, with this

advantage, that the bills did not lead to unpleasantness. Her

difficulties commenced when Paris at last definitely resumed its normal

aspect and life, when all the women and children came back to those

city termini which they had left in such huddled, hysterical throngs,

when flats were re-opened that had long been shut, and men who for a

whole year had had the disadvantages and the advantages of being

without wife and family, anchored themselves once more to the hearth.

Then it was that Sophia failed to keep all her rooms let. She could

have let them easily and constantly and at high rents; but not to men

without encumbrances. Nearly every day she refused attractive tenants

in pretty hats, or agreeable gentlemen who only wanted a room on

condition that they might offer hospitality to a dashing petticoat. It

was useless to proclaim aloud that her house was 'serious.' The

ambition of the majority of these joyous persons was to live in a

'serious' house, because each was sure that at bottom he or she was a

'serious' person, and quite different from the rest of the joyous

world. The character of Sophia's flat, instead of repelling the wrong

kind of aspirant, infallibly drew just that kind. Hope was

inextinguishable in these bosoms. They heard that there would be no

chance for them at Sophia's; but they tried nevertheless. And

occasionally Sophia would make a mistake, and grave unpleasantness

would occur before the mistake could be rectified. The fact was that

the street was too much for her. Few people would credit that there was

a serious boarding-house in the Rue Breda. The police themselves would

not credit it. And Sophia's beauty was against her. At that time the

Rue Breda was perhaps the most notorious street in the centre of Paris;

at the height of its reputation as a warren of individual

improprieties; most busily creating that prejudice against itself

which, over thirty years later, forced the authorities to change its

name in obedience to the wish of its tradesmen. When Sophia went out at

about eleven o'clock in the morning with her reticule to buy, the

street was littered with women who had gone out with reticules to buy.

But whereas Sophia was fully dressed, and wore headgear, the others

were in dressing-gown and slippers, or opera-cloak and slippers, having

slid directly out of unspeakable beds and omitted to brush their hair

out of their puffy eyes. In the little shops of the Rue Breda, the Rue

Notre Dame de Lorette, and the Rue des Martyrs, you were very close

indeed to the primitive instincts of human nature. It was wonderful; it

was amusing; it was excitingly picturesque; and the universality of the

manners rendered moral indignation absurd. But the neighbourhood was

certainly not one in which a woman of Sophia's race, training, and

character, could comfortably earn a living, or even exist. She could

not fight against the entire street. She, and not the street, was out

of place and in the wrong. Little wonder that the neighbours lifted

their shoulders when they spoke of her! What beautiful woman but a mad

Englishwoman would have had the idea of establishing herself in the Rue

Breda with the intention of living like a nun and compelling others to

do the same?

By dint of continual ingenuity, Sophia contrived to win somewhat more

than her expenses, but she was slowly driven to admit to herself that

the situation could not last.

Then one day she saw in Galignani's Messenger an advertisement of an

English pension for sale in the Rue Lord Byron, in the Champs Elysees

quarter. It belonged to some people named Frensham, and had enjoyed a

certain popularity before the war. The proprietor and his wife,

however, had not sufficiently allowed for the vicissitudes of politics

in Paris. Instead of saving money during their popularity they had put

it on the back and on the fingers of Mrs. Frensham. The siege and the

Commune had almost ruined them. With capital they might have restored

themselves to their former pride; but their capital was exhausted.

Sophia answered the advertisement. She impressed the Frenshams, who

were delighted with the prospect of dealing in business with an honest

English face. Like many English people abroad they were most strangely

obsessed by the notion that they had quitted an island of honest men to

live among thieves and robbers. They always implied that dishonesty was

unknown in Britain. They offered, if she would take over the lease, to

sell all their furniture and their renown for ten thousand francs. She

declined, the price seeming absurd to her. When they asked her to name

a price, she said that she preferred not to do so. Upon entreaty, she

said four thousand francs. They then allowed her to see that they

considered her to have been quite right in hesitating to name a price

so ridiculous. And their confidence in the honest English face seemed

to have been shocked. Sophia left. When she got back to the Rue Breda

she was relieved that the matter had come to nothing. She did not

precisely foresee what her future was to be, but at any rate she knew

she shrank from the responsibility of the Pension Frensham. The next

morning she received a letter offering to accept six thousand. She

wrote and declined. She was indifferent and she would not budge from

four thousand. The Frenshams gave way. They were pained, but they gave

way. The glitter of four thousand francs in cash, and freedom, was too

tempting.

Thus Sophia became the proprietress of the Pension Frensham in the cold

and correct Rue Lord Byron. She made room in it for nearly all her

other furniture, so that instead of being under-furnished, as pensions

usually are, it was over-furnished. She was extremely timid at first,

for the rent alone was four thousand francs a year; and the prices of

the quarter were alarmingly different from those of the Rue Breda. She

lost a lot of sleep. For some nights, after she had been installed in

the Rue Lord Byron about a fortnight, she scarcely slept at all, and

she ate no more than she slept. She cut down expenditure to the very

lowest, and frequently walked over to the Rue Breda to do her

marketing. With the aid of a charwoman at six sous an hour she

accomplished everything. And though clients were few, the feat was in

the nature of a miracle; for Sophia had to cook.

The articles which George Augustus Sala wrote under the title "Paris

herself again" ought to have been paid for in gold by the hotel and

pension-keepers of Paris. They awakened English curiosity and the

desire to witness the scene of terrible events. Their effect was

immediately noticeable. In less than a year after her adventurous

purchase, Sophia had acquired confidence, and she was employing two

servants, working them very hard at low wages. She had also acquired

the landlady's manner. She was known as Mrs. Frensham. Across the

balconies of two windows the Frenshams had left a gilded sign, "Pension

Frensham," and Sophia had not removed it. She often explained that her

name was not Frensham; but in vain. Every visitor inevitably and

persistently addressed her according to the sign. It was past the

general comprehension that the proprietress of the Pension Frensham

might bear another name than Frensham. But later there came into being

a class of persons, habitues of the Pension Frensham, who knew the real

name of the proprietress and were proud of knowing it, and by this

knowledge were distinguished from the herd. What struck Sophia was the

astounding similarity of her guests. They all asked the same questions,

made the same exclamations, went out on the same excursions, returned

with the same judgments, and exhibited the same unimpaired assurance

that foreigners were really very peculiar people. They never seemed to

advance in knowledge. There was a constant stream of explorers from

England who had to be set on their way to the Louvre or the Bon Marche.

Sophia's sole interest was in her profits. The excellence of her house

was firmly established. She kept it up, and she kept the modest prices

up. Often she had to refuse guests. She naturally did so with a certain

distant condescension. Her manner to guests increased in stiff

formality; and she was excessively firm with undesirables. She grew to

be seriously convinced that no pension as good as hers existed in the

world, or ever had existed, or ever could exist. Hers was the acme of

niceness and respectability. Her preference for the respectable rose to

a passion. And there were no faults in her establishment. Even the once

despised showy furniture of Madame Foucault had mysteriously changed

into the best conceivable furniture; and its cracks were hallowed.

She never heard a word of Gerald nor of her family. In the thousands of

people who stayed under her perfect roof, not one mentioned Bursley nor

disclosed a knowledge of anybody that Sophia had known. Several men had

the wit to propose marriage to her with more or less skilfulness, but

none of them was skilful enough to perturb her heart. She had forgotten

the face of love. She was a landlady. She was THE landlady: efficient,

stylish, diplomatic, and tremendously experienced. There was no

trickery, no baseness of Parisian life that she was not acquainted with

and armed against. She could not be startled and she could not be

swindled.

Years passed, until there was a vista of years behind her. Sometimes

she would think, in an unoccupied moment, "How strange it is that I

should be here, doing what I am doing!" But the regular ordinariness of

her existence would instantly seize her again. At the end of 1878, the

Exhibition Year, her Pension consisted of two floors instead of one,

and she had turned the two hundred pounds stolen from Gerald into over

two thousand.

BOOK IV

WHAT LIFE IS