Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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In the night he supposed that she believed him to be asleep. He was lying awake, but completely still, when he both felt and heard her leave the bed. He had hung his coat on the brass knob of a bed-post. The room was in darkness but he saw the shape of her dimly against the window-sill. She was at his coat.

He lay very still. He was not conscious of feeling angry. There were a few notes in his wallet, for he had handed over the rest of his cash to the clerk in the hotel office and had had it locked up in the office safe. He heard the faint rustling of the paper, a very small and sad sound in the stillness, like the crepitations of dead leaves. She was taking his money and he was not angry. He realized now that she had suffered his embraces, all that human and intimate contact, because it was her business to suffer such things. He had been rather shy like an awkward boy, and she had been nice to him, and easy, like a good-natured nurse. At the end of it all he had found himself feeling strangely dissatisfied and ashamed, but not on her account. He had experienced compassion. The sadness of sporadic sex! He had turned over and pretended to go to sleep.

He heard her steal across the room towards the mantelpiece. He supposed that she was hiding the notes there. He did not regret them. He was realizing their two separate entities which no physical contact could merge, the essence of the young woman of the streets and that of the middle-aged man who paid. He felt no disgust, but he did feel a great sadness, the slipping away of an illusion. Appetite, just what was it? And compassion?

She returned to the bed. She appeared to stand and listen. She had taken both her fee and her perquisite, and after all—could he blame her? Very gently she lay down beside him, and her noiselessness did not strike him as treacherous; it was like the glide of some soft warm animal back to its nest. He closed his eyes and pretended to breathe deeply.

Did she expect him to examine his pocket-book in the morning? Did she count on his being too shy and self-conscious to accuse her of having relieved him of the money? He did not know, and he did not care. He did not grudge her the money.

For a great sorrowfulness fell upon him. It was as though he had realized in that alien room the utterness of his isolation. He was a stranger in a strange world. He could buy this and he could buy that. He could purchase the compliance of a particular sort of woman. But that which you could buy was worth nothing. Of course—in a sense he had known it, but he had not realized that it could hurt. Things that were given alone mattered.

His sadness somehow slipped into sleep. He lay as a stranger beside this strange woman, but during those minutes of wakefulness he had become alive to other realities.

He escaped very early. She had pretended to be asleep, and had allowed him to dress and slip out of the room, but he had been quite sure that she had been watching him. The surreptitious silence of his escape was part of the mood of the morning. He saw the empty street and a collection of dustbins waiting to be dealt with, and two or three prowling cats.