The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett (booksvooks TXT) 📕

darkness.

"Thompkins!" called Miss Thompkins loudly to the black darkness, to reassure the drowsy concierge in his hidden den, shutting the door with a bang behind them; and, groping for the hands of the others, she dragged them forward stumbling.

"I never have a match," she said.

They blundered up tenebrous stairs.

"We're just passing my door," said Tommy. "Nick's is higher up."

Then a perpendicular slit of light showed itself--and a portal slightly open could be distinguished.

"I shall quit here," said Tommy. "You go right in."

"You aren't leaving us?" exclaimed Miss Ingate in alarm.

"I won't go in," Tommy persisted in a quiet satiric tone. "I'll leave my door open below, and see you when you come down."

She could be heard descending.

"Why, I guess they're here," said a voice, Nick's, within, and the door was pulled wide open.

"My legs are all of a tremble!" muttered Miss Ingate.

Nick's studio seemed larger than reality because of its inadequate illumination. On a small paint-stained table in the centre was an oil-lamp beneath a round shade that had been decorated by some artist's hand with a series of reclining women in many colours. This lamp made a moon in the midnight of the studio, but it was a moon almost without rays; the shade seemed to imprison the light, save that which escaped from its superior orifice. Against the table stood a tall thin woman in black. Her face was lit by the rays escaping upward; a pale, firm, bland face, with rather prominent cheeks, loose grey hair above, surmounted by a toque. The dress was dark, and the only noticeable feature of it was that the sleeves were finished in white linen; from these the hands emerged calm and veined under the lampshade; in one of them a pair of gloves were clasped. On the table lay a thin mantle.

At the back of the studio there sat another woman, so engloomed that no detail of her could be distinguished.

"As I was saying," the tall upright woman resumed as soon as Miss Ingate and Audrey had been introduced. "Betty Burke is in prison. She got six weeks this morning. She may never come out again. Almost her last words from the dock were that you, Miss Nickall, should be asked to go to London to look after Mrs. Burke, and perhaps to take Betty's place in other ways. She said that her mother preferred you to anybody else, and that she was sure you would come. Shall you?"

The accents were very clear, the face was delicately smiling, the little gestures had a quite tranquil quality. Rosamund did not seem to care whether Miss Nickall obeyed the summons or not. She did not seem to care about anything whatever except her own manner of existing. She was the centre of Paris, and Paris was naught but a circumference for her. All phenomena beyond the individuality of the woman were reduced to the irrelevant and the negligible. It would have been absurd to mention to her costume balls. The frost of her indifference would have wilted them into nothingness.

"Yes, of course, I shall go," Nick answered.

"When?" was the implacable question.

"Oh! By the first train," said Nick eagerly. As she approached the lamp, the gleam of the devotee could be seen in her gaze. In one moment she had sacrificed Paris and art and Tommy and herself, and had risen to the sacred ardour of a vocation. Rosamund was well accustomed to watching the process, and she gave not the least sign of satisfaction or approval.

"I ought to tell you," she went on, "that I came over from London suddenly by the afternoon service in order to escape arrest. I am now a political refugee. Things have come to this pass. You will do well to leave by the first train. That is why I decided to call here before going to bed."

"Where's Tommy?" asked Nick, appealing wildly to Miss Ingate and Audrey. Upon being answered she said, still more wildly: "I must see her. Can you--No, I'll run down myself." In the doorway she turned round: "Mrs. Moncreiff, would you and Miss Ingate like to have my studio while I'm away? I should just love you to. There's a very nice bed over there behind the screen, and a fair sort of couch over here. Do say you will! _Do_!"

"Oh! We will!" Miss Ingate replied at once, reassuringly, as though in haste to grant the supreme request of some condemned victim. And indeed Miss Nickall appeared ready to burst into tears if she should be thwarted.

As soon as Nick had gone, Miss Ingate's smiling face, nervous, intimidated, audacious, sardonic, and good humoured, moved out of the gloom nearer to Rosamund.

"You knew I played the barrel organ all down Regent Street?" she ventured, blushing.

"Ah!" murmured Rosamund, unmoved. "It was you who played the barrel-organ? So it was."

"Yes," said Miss Ingate. "But I'm like you. I don't care passionately for prison. Eh! Eh! I'm not so vehy, vehy fond of it. I don't know Miss Burke, but what a pity she has got six weeks, isn't it? Still, I was vehy much struck by what someone said to me to-day--that you'd be vehy sorry if women _did_ get the vote. I think I should be sorry, too--you know what I mean."

"Perfectly," ejaculated Rosamund, with a pleasant smile.

"I hope I'm not skidding," said Miss Ingate still more timidly, but also with a sardonic giggle, looking round into the gloom. "I do skid sometimes, you know, and we've just come away from a----"

She could not finish.

"And Mrs. Moncreiff, if I've got the name right, is she with us, too?" asked Rosamund, miraculously urbane. And added: "I hear she has wealth and is the mistress of it."

Audrey jumped up, smiling, and lifting her veil. She could not help smiling. The studio, the lamp, Rosamund with her miraculous self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her. Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and strange disguises and sensuous contacts. She had the most careless contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every melancholy effort to reform the world. The world did not need reforming and did not want to be reformed.

"Perhaps you don't know my story," Audrey began, not realising how she would continue. "I am a widow. I made an unhappy marriage. My husband on the day after our wedding-day began to eat peas with his knife. In a week I was forced to leave him. And a fortnight later I heard that he was dead of blood-poisoning. He had cut his mouth."

And she thought:

"What is the matter with me? I have ruined myself." All her exultation had collapsed.

But Rosamund remarked gravely:

"It is a common story."

Suddenly there was a movement in the obscure corner where sat the unnamed and unintroduced lady. This lady rose and came towards the table. She was very elegant in dress and manner, and she looked maturely young.

"Madame Piriac," announced Rosamund.

Audrey recoiled.... Gazing hard at the face, she saw in it a vague but undeniable resemblance to certain admired photographs which had arrived at Moze from France.

"Pardon me!" said Madame Piriac in English with a strong French accent. "I shall like very much to hear the details of this story of _petits pois_." The tone of Madame Piriac's question was unexceptionable; it took account of Audrey's mourning attire, and of her youthfulness; but Audrey could formulate no answer to it. Instead of speaking she gave a touch to her veil, and it dropped before her piquant, troubled, inscrutable face like a screen.

Miss Ingate said with noticeable calm, but also with the air of a conspirator who sees danger to a most secret machination:

"I'm afraid Mrs. Moncreiff won't care to go into details."

It was neatly done. Madame Piriac brought the episode to a close with a sympathetic smile and an apposite gesture. And Audrey, safe behind her veil, glanced gratefully and admiringly at Miss Ingate, who, taken quite unawares, had been so surprisingly able thus to get her out of a scrape. She felt very young and callow among these three women, and the mere presence of Madame Piriac, of whom years ago she had created for herself a wondrous image, put her into a considerable flutter. On the whole she was ready to believe that the actual Madame Piriac was quite equal to the image of her founded on photographs and letters. She set her teeth, and decided that Madame Piriac should not learn her identity--yet! There was little risk of her discovering it for herself, for no photograph of Audrey had gone to Paris for a dozen years, and Miss Ingate's loyalty was absolute.

As Audrey sat down again, the illustrious Rosamund took a chair near her, and it could not be doubted that the woman had the mien and the carriage of a leader.

"You are very rich, are you not?" asked Rosamund, in a tone at once deferential and intimate, and she smiled very attractively in the gloom. Impossible not to reckon with that smile, as startling as it was seductive!

Evidently Nick had been communicative.

"I suppose I am," murmured Audrey, like a child, and feeling like a child. Yet at the same time she was asking herself with fierce curiosity: "What has Madame Piriac got to do with this woman?"

"I hear you have eight or ten thousand a year and can do what you like with it. And you cannot be more than twenty-three.... What a responsibility it must be for you! You are a friend of Miss Ingate's and therefore on our side. Indeed, if a woman such as you were not on our side, I wonder whom we _could_ count on. Miss Ingate is, of course, a subscriber to the Union--"

"Only a very little one," cried Miss Ingate.

Audrey had never felt so abashed since an ex-parlourmaid at Flank Hall, who had left everything to join the Salvation Army, had asked her once in the streets of Colchester whether she had found salvation. She knew that she, if any one, ought to subscribe to the Suffragette Union, and to subscribe largely. For she was a convinced suffragette by faith, because Miss Ingate was a convinced suffragette. If Miss Ingate had been a Mormon, Audrey also would have been a Mormon. And, although she hated to subscribe, she knew also that if Rosamund demanded from her any subscription, however large--even a thousand pounds--she would not know how to refuse. She felt before Rosamund as hundreds of women, and not a few men, had felt.

"I may be leaving for Germany to-morrow," Rosamund proceeded. "I may not see you again--at any rate for many weeks. May I write to London that you mean to support us?"

Audrey was giving herself up for lost, and not without reason. She foreshadowed a future of steely self-sacrifice, propaganda, hammers, riots, and prison; with no self-indulgence in it, no fine clothes, no art, and no young men save earnest young men. She saw herself in the iron clutch of her own conscience and sense of duty. And she was frightened. But at that moment Nick rushed into the room, and the spell was broken. Nick considered that she had the right to monopolise Rosamund, and she monopolised her.

Miss Ingate prudently gathered Audrey to her side, and was off with her. Nick ran to kiss