Читать книгу The Woman Who Stole Everything and Other Stories - Arnold Bennett - Страница 14

Table of Contents

“I get up,” said Cora. “That’s the beginning, I suppose.”

“What time?”

“Oh! It depends. I never allow anybody to call me. You see it’s most important for me to have all the sleep I can. Nothing ages you like loss of sleep. The doctor says so. He says I ought to have nine hours if possible. But of course it isn’t often I do have nine hours. Houses are so noisy in the mornings. Servants simply will not be quiet. They don’t understand. Servants have a mentality of their own, and they’re all the same. I’ve tried dozens of servants.”

“When do the servants get up?”

“They’re supposed to be down by seven o’clock; but do you think they are?”

“And you get up—when?”

“Well, I have my breakfast in bed—on a tray. It saves so much trouble. And, of course, though they never consider you, you have to consider them. Besides, I always feel rather queer when I wake up.”

“Ten or eleven o’clock, I expect?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest of the morning?”

“Well, I have to dress. I’ve no maid. The housemaid is supposed to maid me, but her notion of maiding——” Cora laughed derisively. “The parlourmaid looks after Nick much better than the housemaid looks after me. I suppose that’s right. Nick’s the most important—the breadwinner, as they say, and he must have all the care.”

“By the time you’re dressed I suppose it’s time for lunch?”

“Not at all. I’m never later than twelve-thirty, Then there’s shopping, and a million things that a woman has to do.”

“Housekeeping?”

“Oh! I never bother about housekeeping. I was never taught that, or brought up to it. I see the cook, unless I’m in a very great hurry. She’s a sort of cook-housekeeper. We only have the three servants, you see.”

“And you lunch?”

“I’m not very keen on lunch, unless I’m invited out. Nick never accepts an invitation to lunch. So I have to go alone. Some hostesses don’t care so frightfully for that. In the ordinary way either I have an egg at home, or I go to the Club—I mean my own Club—not the Legation.”

“And then?”

“Well, you mustn’t forget there’s such a thing as clothes, darling uncle. Clothes take a long time, especially for a poor woman like me, who has to make things last, and with no maid to help her. I know women who have a maid who can alter dresses, and it saves them the maid’s wages over and over again. Only husbands can’t see that. Oh no! Husbands simply say that they can’t afford to pay for a maid. It’s very short-sighted.”

“And later in the afternoons?”

“Well, I have a few friends who stick to me in spite of all my faults. We may play Bridge, or we go to art-galleries, or the pictures. I think the film has a very great future, and it’s our duty to watch it and encourage it. Some people don’t see it in that light; but I do. Or we go to a matinée, but I don’t care so much for the matinées, because the audience is nearly all women and they will giggle.”

“I expect by the time you get back home, Nick’s back, too.”

“That’s just where you’re wrong, darling uncle. Nick is always late. Office, naturally! Everything has to give way to the office. I’m always home first, and I try to be all ready for him and looking as nice as I can. I only dress to please him, and because I want him not to be ashamed of me. What a bad thing it would be for him in his business if he had a shabby wife!”

“Then you see Nick for the first time in the day when he comes home?”

“No! Not always. If I happen to be awake I call to him while he’s dressing, and he comes in to say good morning. That’s the time I should love a good long gossip with him, but he’s generally in such a frightful hurry. Yes, he can’t spare me any time in the morning, and at night he always says he must get to sleep. So what am I to do? The fact is, I never see him.”

“But you spend the evenings together?”

“Sometimes he has to work in the evenings. Then I play the piano a bit, or read a book, and I slip off to bed quietly so as not to disturb him at his work. But of course we dine out, or have people to dinner, now and then. Not that you can entertain, really, with only three servants. We go to first-nights. I adore first-nights. I’d go to all of them if I could, but Nick’s so easily bored at the theatre. And we dance sometimes at the Legation—but you know about that.... And that’s about all, I think. Of course there’s Sundays. We have been known to go away for a week-end—but the fuss on Monday mornings about Nick being late for the office!”

“And holidays?”

“This year we went to Cannes in January. But only for a fortnight. I should love to spend months in Cannes, months, like other people do. And last summer we were at Le Touquet for a month, nearly. I danced every night. I never went to bed till two o’clock. It was simply heavenly. But at Le Touquet people really do understand how to enjoy themselves. This summer’s a bit muddled. God knows what will happen these next few weeks! Nick hasn’t mentioned a holiday, and I wasn’t going to be the first to mention it.”

Henry Kearns made no comment. They both smoked again, and not a word said. A faint murmur rose to them over the Downs from the far distance of the Flats; it was like the hum of an insect’s wings. Then it increased into the noise of the last train from London. It was a resounding roar. There could be seen a red glow from the funnel of the engine, dragging furiously after it a long procession of pale lights. A momentarily still louder roar as the train crossed the iron bridge over the river! The racket of the train seemed to awaken the whole firmament and to fill it.

“Oh, uncle!” cried Cora, suddenly. “How cruel of you, with your questions, making me tell my life like that! Do you think I didn’t notice the sarcasm in your questions: the way you put them?”

“Not at all,” Henry protested, soothingly. “I only wanted to get at the facts. There wasn’t any sarcasm.”

“Oh yes, there was!” she insisted. “Yes, there was! And you were quite right. I should be sarcastic myself if I were in your place.”

The sound of the train diminished; it was the hum of an insect’s wings; it was nothing. Silence.

“Let’s go back to the house,” Cora went on, in a fatigued, repining voice. “I can’t stand being here.”

And with the emphasis on the word “stand,” she threw away her cigarette, which curved in the air and lay abandoned, but burning, on the grass a dozen feet off. “It’s too big up here, and I can’t stand it; and men and women’s bones underneath me and everything!” She did not rise to go, but pulled a tiny handkerchief from her bag and began to fan herself feebly. “I’ve told you my life is terrible, and so it is! I know that as well as anybody. But is it my fault? What am I to do? I was brought up like that, and I can only be myself. Do you think I haven’t thought of all this before? Do you think I don’t want to be different? I suppose you imagine I’m happy! I do want to be different, but I can’t. Every day it’s the same. You won’t believe me if I say I’d like my bones to be inside this tumulus; but it’s true!”

Her tone, tragic, sincere, and distressed, was really heart-rending; it was as if a great tortured soul struggled to escape through her little rouged mouth.

“I won’t sit on a grave. In a thousand years my bones will be somewhere, too, and some girl will be sitting on them. But what does it matter?” She moved across to the Spanish shawl, and lay down on it, her left hip rising out of the rest of the body like a hill.

Henry was afflicted. He desired intensely to be of help to his niece; for he had made the astounding discovery that a human being was not utterly evil; that Cora had a troubled conscience, aspirations towards righteousness, and a secret, withdrawn, piteous life, throbbing painfully beneath the dailiness of her worldly existence. And, he thought, perhaps too complacently:

“I have brought this to the surface, and nobody else has.”

And he pictured Nick still coming nearer and nearer, and he had hopes, for her and for Nick, of a marvellous re-birth, all due to himself, which hopes made him feel creative like a god.

“I’ll tell you how it strikes me,” he said very quietly, leaving the tumulus and sitting close by her on the shawl. He did not look at her, nor touch her, but gazed vaguely over the Flats. “What you need, my dear girl, is to see yourself, and you aren’t doing it. Your arguments about yourself are all upside down. And what’s more, there’s a part of your mind that knows they’re upside down. Now, for instance, you don’t really believe that you dress in order to please Nick and help him in his business. All that’s only an excuse. You spend money on dress because you like to look your best, and no other reason. If you didn’t you’d excuse your dowdiness by saying that you didn’t spend money on dress because you wanted to save his money for him. The fact is, you’re jealous of his business and you’d like him to make money without earning it. You haven’t understood that money has to be paid for, somehow, like everything else. You say you lie in bed in the morning because you must have sleep, and not enough sleep ages you. Rot, my dear! Cocktails will age you, but you go on drinking ’em. If you need sleep, why in the name of sense don’t you go early to bed? Well, you don’t go early to bed because you enjoy staying up late and drinking cocktails and dancing, and all these things are more important to you than your health and your looks and Nick’s health and Nick’s breakfast. That’s the size of it—trust me!”

“You are preaching, darling uncle!” Cora interjected feebly.

“I know I am. But, dash it—you’re asking for preaching, the way you go on. And what else can I do? Look at your attitude to servants. It’s all wrong. You have the infernal impudence to say they’re ‘supposed’ to get up at seven—and you get up at eleven, and have your breakfast brought to you. Do you know the difference between you and your servants? Your servants earn money and you only spend it. They work and you’re idle. They’ve learnt a job and they can do it, and you can’t do any job on earth. You’re ‘supposed’ to be the mistress of a house, and you couldn’t run it to save your life. You can’t even keep accounts, though anyone could learn to keep your sort of accounts in a fortnight. I expect you’ll be telling me next you’ve forgotten the blooming multiplication table! Your servants could teach you lots of things, but you couldn’t teach them anything—yes, you could, you could teach them how to powder their noses. And you look down on them! And that’s not the worst. The worst is that they think you’ve got the right to look down on them. That’s what’s up with society to-day. And you think yourself ill-used because there are two of you and you’ve only got three of these immortal souls that you call servants who pass their whole lives in waiting on you and Nick hand and foot. Yes, by God! I am preaching. What have you ever done to be proud of? You’re simply an incapable, who wants everything for nothing. When you married Nick he took the responsibility of keeping you, and before you married you took jolly good care to be sure that he could keep you. And what do you give him in return—except your bare body? Nothing. Not a thing! You steal everything—that’s what it amounts to. And yet you have the nerve to have grievances! Supposing Nick happened to be ruined—you couldn’t even cook for him; you wouldn’t know how to nurse him if he was ill; I’m dashed if you could do his mending. Are you humble about it all? Not you! You’re proud of it. Hasn’t it ever struck you that you’re only something nice to look at—and you won’t be even that for very long if you continue at your present rate. What do you think you’ll be like in another twenty years? You’ll be nothing but a damned nuisance to anybody you have to live with.”

Cora stirred, and her uneasy movement warned Henry Kearns to rise off the shawl. He walked away—just a few yards—restless and nervous. The mass with the mound in the middle, which was Cora, heaved itself up, and Cora stood. She seemed to shiver, stooped for the shawl, and draped it with conscious craft round her shoulders. Then she gazed at Henry, the light of the moon full on her. She looked at him plaintively, not protesting, not defiant; but rather as if she were saying: “Is that all? Have you finished with me? Or have I still more to endure? I know I’m at your mercy.”

Henry was ashamed of his preaching—he with the damnable superiority of the untempted man! Yet what could he do but preach? She had to be told, and she had to be told emphatically, even violently, if any result was to be obtained. Thus he sought to justify himself and extinguish his shame—and failed to do so. How facile his arguments and how unanswerable!

Yet there was falsity in his reasoning, and especially in his comparison of her, to her disadvantage, with cooks, parlourmaids, and housemaids. She had what they had not and could never have. In her sloth, and her absorption in herself, and her determination to get all that it was possible to get out of the world of men and women, she had achieved an ideal far beyond their reach. She was desirable; she was marvellous to look upon; to watch her gave pleasure to Henry Kearns. And neither the fact that her mere face was not strictly beautiful, nor his sharply aroused sense of her vices and faults, could lessen his pleasure and his admiration. She was desirable, marvellous and magnificent. She had a sovereign power, and she knew it. She had a prestige. The moon and the wide sky and the vastness of the Downs could not reduce her to triviality or the contemptible. She challenged them and matched them. She was one of the finished products of a civilisation. Arguments were futile against her and could not scathe her. There she was! Was he to criticise God?

She said sadly:

“Why didn’t you talk to mamma and papa twenty years ago? I was brought up like that. It’s not my fault. However can I help being myself?”

Henry was about to reply that everybody was responsible for himself, and that it was the business of children to correct in themselves the errors of their parents. But he refrained: the matter was too complex: he saw with the easy, clear insight of one who had observed many societies and instinctively avoided all blinding emotions, that not Cora’s father and mother were to blame for her defects and her misfortune, but the mighty stream of evolution itself.

“Let’s go back home,” he suggested compassionately.

Time was passing and he did not want to be late for Nick. He was just as apprehensive as ever of the clash and upshot of the encounter which he had secretly and too rashly planned.