Sacred and Profane Love by Arnold Bennett (best business books of all time TXT) 📕

into the wide, gray landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon; and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.

'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.

It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the other could not be far away.

She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had done.

'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous simper; and she passed on.

This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly. What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I left without delay and went back to my coupe; it would have been a pity to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for. I read a little in the Imitation of Christ which Aunt Constance had meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I read, 'unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'

Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every steamer a few such are to be found.

More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their facades occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we trailed slowly our disgust.

We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a train de grand luxe, while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms, guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was Yvonne's. I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted Paris long since. It was after seven o'clock. 'On dit que le diner est servi, madame said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits to follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his moustaches. He turned round.

It was Frank.

He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the swaying train.

'Good God!' he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.

I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.

'Why have you followed me, Frank?' I asked gloomily, in a whisper.

I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at the end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an endearment. But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless with a fatal surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.

'I've not followed you,' he said. 'I joined the train at Paris. I'd no idea you were on the train till I saw you in the corner asleep, through the window of the compartment. I've been waiting here till you came out.'

'Have you seen the Vicarys?'

'Yes,' he answered.

'Ah! You've been away from London all this time?'

'I couldn't stay. I couldn't. I've been in Belgium and Holland. Then I went to Paris. And now--you see me.'

'I'm going to Mentone,' I said. 'I had thought of Monte Carlo first, but I changed my mind. Where are you going to?'

'Mentone,' he said.

We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other's eyes. A string of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew into my compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.

'Come in here a minute,' I said, when they were gone.

He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.

'No,' I said; 'don't shut it. Leave it like that.'

He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.

'Carlotta,' he said at last--I had perceived that he was struggling to a resolution--'this is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever we do, everybody will believe that we are running off together.'

'I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,' I said; and I told him about Miss Kate's treatment of me at lunch. 'But how can that affect us?' I demanded.

'Mary will believe it--does believe, I'm sure. Long before this, people will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us, it's all over. Our hand is forced, isn't it?'

'Frank,' I said, 'didn't you think my letter was right?'

'I obeyed it,' he replied heavily. 'I haven't even written to you. I meant to when I got to Mentone.'

'But didn't you think I was right?'

'I don't know. Yes--I suppose it was.' His lower lip fell. 'Of course I don't want you to do anything that you--'

'Dinner, please,' said my negro, putting his head between us.

We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell Yvonne not to wait for me.

'There's your maid, too,' said Frank. 'How are we going to get out of it? The thing's settled for us.'

'My dear, dear boy!' I exclaimed. 'Are we to outrage our consciences simply because people think we have outraged them?'

'It isn't my conscience--it's yours,' he said.

'Well, then--mine.'

I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.

'Why are you so hard, Carlotta?' he cried. 'I can't understand you. I never could. But you'll kill me--that's what you'll do.'

Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism melted in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say that the spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or that tragedy may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation was our true marriage. I realize it now--a union that nothing can soil nor impair.

'I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,' I murmured. 'But you must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.'

And I withdrew my hand.

He shook his head.

'You've no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I cannot.'

'Forgive me,' I said. 'I have only the right to ask you to leave me.'

'Then there is no hope?'

His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!

I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.

A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the windows of the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train with its enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an ice-gripped night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his shaking, snorting, monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our lives and our loves in his hand.

'We'll leave each other now, Frank,' I said, 'before the people begin to come back from dinner. Go and eat something.'

'But you?'

'I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our compartment till we arrive.'

'Yes. And when we do arrive--what then? What are your wishes? You see, I can't leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my registered luggage.'

He spoke appealingly.

The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!

'You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again during the day.'

'As you wish,' he said.

'Good-night!' I whispered. 'Good-bye!' And I turned to my compartment.

'Carlotta!' he cried despairingly.

But I shut the door and drew the blinds.

Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen Frank. No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.

All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me, and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead, shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver, outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that his existence had compensations.


V


Early on the second