The Pretty Lady. Arnold Bennett
said:
"You understand life. … How nice it is here!" He looked about and then sighed.
"But why do you sigh?"
"Sigh of content! I was just thinking this place would be something else if an English girl had it. It is curious, lamentable, that English girls understand nothing—certainly not love."
"As for that, I've always heard so."
"They understand nothing. Not even warmth. One is cold in their rooms."
"As for that—I mean warmth—one may say that I understand it; I do."
"You understand more than warmth. What is your name?"
"Christine."
She was the accidental daughter of a daughter of joy. The mother, as frequently happens in these cases, dreamed of perfect respectability for her child and kept Christine in the country far away in Paris, meaning to provide a good dowry in due course. At forty-two she had not got the dowry together, nor even begun to get it together, and she was ill. Feckless, dilatory and extravagant, she saw as in a vision her own shortcomings and how they might involve disaster for Christine. Christine, she perceived, was a girl imperfectly educated—for in the affair of Christine's education the mother had not aimed high enough—indolent, but economical, affectionate, and with a very great deal of temperament. Actuated by deep maternal solicitude, she brought her daughter back to Paris, and had her inducted into the profession [16] under the most decent auspices. At nineteen Christine's second education was complete. Most of it the mother had left to others, from a sense of propriety. But she herself had instructed Christine concerning the five great plagues of the profession. And also she had adjured her never to drink alcohol save professionally, never to invest in anything save bonds of the City of Paris, never to seek celebrity, which according to the mother meant ultimate ruin, never to mix intimately with other women. She had expounded the great theory that generosity towards men in small things is always repaid by generosity in big things—and if it is not the loss is so slight! And she taught her the fundamental differences between nationalities. With a Russian you had to eat, drink and listen. With a German you had to flatter, and yet adroitly insert, "Do not imagine that I am here for the fun of the thing." With an Italian you must begin with finance. With a Frenchman you must discuss finance before it is too late. With an Englishman you must talk, for he will not, but in no circumstances touch finance until he has mentioned it. In each case there was a risk, but the risk should be faced. The course of instruction finished, Christine's mother had died with a clear conscience and a mind consoled.
Said Christine, conversational, putting the question that lips seemed then to articulate of themselves in obedience to its imperious demand for utterance:
"How long do you think the war will last?"
The man answered with serenity: [17] "The war has not begun yet."
"How English you are! But all the same, I ask myself whether you would say that if you had seen Belgium. I came here from Ostend last month." The man gazed at her with new vivacious interest.
"So it is like that that you are here!"
"But do not let us talk about it," she added quickly with a mournful smile.
"No, no!" he agreed. … "I see you have a piano. I expect you are fond of music."
"Ah!" she exclaimed in a fresh, relieved tone. "Am I fond of it! I adore it, quite simply. Do play for me. Play a boston—a two-step."
"I can't," he said.
"But you play. I am sure of it."
"And you?" he parried.
She made a sad negative sign.
"Well, I'll play something out of The Rosenkavalier."
"Ah! But you are a musician!" She amiably scrutinised him. "And yet—no."
Smiling, he, too, made a sad negative sign.
"The waltz out of The Rosenkavalier, eh?"
"Oh, yes! A waltz. I prefer waltzes to anything."
As soon as he had played a few bars she passed demurely out of the sitting-room, through the main part of the bedroom into the cabinet de toilette. She moved about in the cabinet de toilette thinking that the waltz out of The Rosenkavalier was divinely exciting. The delicate sound of her movements and the plash of water came to him across the bedroom. As he played he threw a [18] glance at her now and then; he could see well enough, but not very well because the smoke of the shortening cigarette was in his eyes.
She returned at length into the sitting-room, carrying a small silk bag about five inches by three. The waltz finished.
"But you'll take cold!" he murmured.
"No. At home I never take cold. Besides—"
Smiling at him as he swung round on the music-stool, she undid the bag, and drew from it some folded stuff which she slowly shook out, rather in the manner of a conjurer, until it was revealed as a full-sized kimono. She laughed.
"Is it not marvellous?"
"It is."
"That is what I wear. In the way of chiffons it is the only fantasy I have bought up to the present in London. Of course, clothes—I have been forced to buy clothes. It matches exquisitely the stockings, eh?"
She slid her arms into the sleeves of the transparency. She was a pretty and highly developed girl of twenty-six, short, still lissom, but with the fear of corpulence in her heart. She had beautiful hair and beautiful eyes, and she had that pucker of the forehead denoting, according to circumstances, either some kindly, grave preoccupation or a benevolent perplexity about something or other.
She went near him and clasped hands round his neck, and whispered:
"Your waltz was adorable. You are an artist."
And with her shoulders she seemed to sketch the movements of dancing.
[19]
Chapter 4
CONFIDENCE
After putting on his thick overcoat and one glove he had suddenly darted to the dressing-table for his watch, which he was forgetting. Christine's face showed sympathetic satisfaction that he had remembered in time, simultaneously implying that even if he had not remembered, the watch would have been perfectly safe till he called for it. The hour was five minutes to midnight. He was just going. Christine had dropped a little batch of black and red Treasury notes on to the dressing-table with an indifferent if not perhaps an impatient air, as though she held these financial sequels to be a stain on the ideal, a tedious necessary, a nuisance, or simply negligible.
She kissed him goodbye, and felt agreeably fragile and soft within the embrace of his huge, rough overcoat. And she breathed winningly, delicately, apologetically into his ear:
"Thou wilt give something to the servant?" Her soft eyes seemed to say, "It is not for myself that I am asking, is it?"
He made an easy philanthropic gesture to indicate that the servant would have no reason to regret his passage.
He opened the door into the little hall, where the fat Italian maid was yawning in an atmosphere [20] comparatively cold, and then, in a change of purpose, he shut the door again.
"You do not know how I knew you could not have been in London very long," he said confidentially.
"No."
"Because I saw you in Paris one night in July—at the Marigny Theatre."
"Not at the Marigny."
"Yes. The Marigny."