"Absurd! I will find a flat. I know precisely where there is a flat."
"But will they let it to me?"
"They will let it to _me_, I suppose," said he, still casually.
A pause ensued.
She said, in a voice trembling:
"Thou art not going to say to me that thou wilt put me among my own furniture?"
"The flat is furnished. But it is the same thing."
"Do not let such a hope shine before me--me who saw before me only the pavement. Thou art not serious."
"I never was more serious. For whom dost thou take me, little-foolish one?"
She cried:
"Oh, you English! You are _chic_. You make love as you go to war. Like _that_!... One word--it is decided! And there is nothing more to say!
Ah! You English!"
She had almost screamed, shuddering under the shock of his decision, for which she had impossibly hoped, but whose reality overwhelmed her. He sat there in front of her, elegant, impeccably dressed, distinguished, aristocratic, rich, in the full wisdom of his years, and in the strength of his dominating will, and in the righteousness of his heart. One could absolutely trust such as him to do the right thing, and to do it generously, and to do it all the time. And she, _she_ had won him. He had recognised her qualities. She had denied any claim upon him, but by his decision he had admitted a claim--a claim that no money could satisfy. After all, for eighteen months she had been more to him than any other woman. He had talked freely to her.
He had concealed naught from her. He had spoken to her of his discouragements and his weaknesses. He had had no shame before her.
By her acquiescences, her skill, her warmth, her adaptability, her intense womanliness, she had created between them a bond stronger than anything that could keep them apart. The bond existed. It could not during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty. A disloyalty, she divined, would irrevocably destroy it. But she had no fear on that score, for she knew her own nature. His decision did more than fill her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness--it re-established her self-respect. No ordinary woman, handicapped as she was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ... And the notion that her pa.s.sion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous, like the notion that he would tire of her. She was saved. She burst into wild tears.
"Ah! Pardon me!" she sobbed. "I am quite calm, really. But since the air-raid, thou knowest, I have not been quite the same ... Thou! Thou art different. Nothing could disturb thy calm. Ah! If thou wert a general at the front! What sang-froid! What presence of mind! But I--"
He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him she kept muttering to him:
"Hope not that I shall thank thee. I cannot. I cannot! The words with which I could thank thee do not exist. But I am thine, thine! All of me is thine. Humiliate me! Demand of me impossible things! I am thy slave, thy creature! Ah! Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. I love thy hair. And thy ears ..."
The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound, unchangeable difference between these two. She would discipline her temperament; she would subjugate it. Women were capable of miracles--and women alone. And she was capable of miracles.
A strange, m.u.f.fled noise came to them across the darkness of the sitting-room, and G.J. raised his head slightly to listen.
"Repose! Repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother," she breathed softly. "It is nothing. It is but the wind blowing the blind against the curtains."
And later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was tranquillised, she said:
"And where is it, this flat?"
Chapter 39
IDYLL
Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mere Gaston, the new servant in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to "Hoape, Albany":
"Give it to me. I will put it in front of the clock on the mantelpiece."
And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. She did so with a little gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a whole.
The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J.
in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the c.u.mbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty s.p.a.ces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it even to her memory of G.J."s flat in the Albany. Its golden ornateness flattered her. The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. She had never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like it. But then Gilbert was always better than his word.
He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith. Judiciously, she had never made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great ill.u.s.trious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs.
Carlos Smith in the tenancy. And when Gilbert told her that he had had his eye on the flat for her before Mrs. Carlos Smith took it, and had hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud. And rea.s.sured also. For this detail was a proof that Gilbert had really had the intention to put her "among her own furniture" long before the night of the supreme appeal to him.... Only he was always so cautious.
And Gilbert was the discoverer of la mere Gaston, too, and as frank about her as about the flat. La mere Gaston was the widow of a French soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her. A few weeks earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding had fallen ill for a s.p.a.ce, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as charwoman to aid Mrs. Braiding"s young sister in the Albany flat. With excellent judgment Gilbert had chosen her to succeed Marthe, whom he himself had reproachfully dismissed from Cork Street.
He was amazingly clever, was Gilbert, for he had so arranged things that Christine had been able to cut off her Cork Street career as with a knife. She had departed from Cork Street with two trunks and a few cardboard boxes--her stove was abandoned to the landlord--and vanished into London and left no trace. Except Gilbert, n.o.body who knew her in Cork Street was aware of her new address, and n.o.body who knew her in Mayfair knew that she had come from Cork Street. Her ancient acquaintances in Cork Street would ring the bell there in vain.
Madame Gaston was a neat, plump woman of perhaps forty, not looking her years. She had a comprehending eye. After three words from Gilbert she had mastered the situation, and as she perfectly realised where her interest lay she could be relied upon for discretion. In all delicate matters only her eye talked. She was a Protestant, and went to the French church in Soho Square, which she called the "Temple".
Christine and she had had but one Sunday together--and Christine had gone with her to the Temple! The fact was that Christine had decided to be a Protestant. She needed a religion, and Catholicism had an inconvenience--confession. She had regularised her position, so much so that by comparison with the past she was now perfectly respectable.
Yet if she had been candid in the confessional the priest would still have convicted her of mortal sin; which would have been very unfair; and she could not, in view of her respectability, have remained a Catholic without confessing, however infrequently. Madame Gaston, as soon as she was sure of her convert, referred to Catholicism as "idolatry".
"Put your ap.r.o.n on, Marie," said Christine. "Monsieur will be here directly."
"Ah, yes, madame!"
"Have you opened the kitchen-window to take away the smell of cooking?"
"Yes, madame."
"Am I all right, Marie?"
Madame Gaston surveyed her mistress, who turned round.
"Yes, madame. I think that monsieur will much like that _negligee_."
She departed to don the ap.r.o.n.
Between these two it was continually "monsieur," "monsieur". He was seldom there, but he was always there, always being consulted, placated, invoked, revered, propitiated, magnified. He was the giver of all good, and there was no other Allah, and he had two prophets.
Christine sang, she twittered, she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful joy. She had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune had washed her pure. She looked at herself in the ma.s.sive bevelled mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful.
And she felt triumphant. Gilbert had expressed the fear that she might get lonely and bored. He had even said that occasionally he might bring along a man, and that perhaps the man would have a very nice woman friend. She had not very heartily responded. She was markedly sympathetic towards Englishmen, but towards English women--no! And especially she did not want to know any English women in the same situation as herself. Lonely? Impossible! Bored? Impossible! She had an establishment. She had a civil list. Her days pa.s.sed like an Arabian dream. She never had an unfilled moment, and when each day was over she always remembered little things which she had meant to do and had not found time to do.
She was a superb sleeper, and arose at noon. Three o"clock usually struck before her day had fairly begun--unless, of course, she happened to be very busy, in which case she would be ready for contact with the world at the lunch-hour. Her main occupation was to charm, allure, and gratify a man; for that she lived. Her distractions were music, the reading of novels, _Le Journal_, and _Les Grandes Modes_.
And for the war she knitted. In her new situation it was essential that she should do something for the war. Therefore she knitted, being a good knitter, and her knitting generally lay about.
She popped into the dining-room to see if the table was well set for dinner. It was, but in order to show that Marie did not know everything, she rearranged somewhat the flowers in the central bowl.
Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and waited. The instant of arrival approached. Gilbert"s punctuality was absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. She could not have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexact.i.tude of her clock.... The bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a five-finger exercise. Often in the old life she had executed upon him this innocent subterfuge, to make him think she practised the piano to a greater extent than she actually did, that indeed she was always practising. It never occurred to her that he was not deceived.
Hear Marie fly to the front door! See Christine"s face, see her body, as in her pale, bright gown she peeps round the half-open door of the drawing-room! She lives, then. Her eyes sparkle for the giver of all good, for the adored, and her brow is puckered for him, and the jewels on her hand burn for him, and every pleat of her garments visible and invisible is pleated for him. She is a child. She has s.n.a.t.c.hed up a chocolate, and put it between her teeth, and so she offers the half of it to him, smiling, silent. She is a child, but she is also a woman intensely skilled in her art....