The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett [138]
So he said to himself. Yet all the time his dignity, and his pride also, were bleeding, dropping invisible blood along the length of the Strand pavements.
He was at Salisbury Street again. He pictured her in the bedroom. Damn her! He wanted her. He wanted her with an excessive desire. He hated to think that he had been baulked. He hated to think that she would remain immaculate. And he continued to picture her in the exciting privacy of that cursed bedroom.
Now he was walking down Salisbury Street. He did not wish to be walking down Salisbury Street; but there he was!
"Oh, hell!" he murmured. "I suppose I must go through with it."
He felt desperate. He was ready to pay any price in order to be able to say to himself that he had accomplished what he had set his heart on.
"My wife hasn't gone out, has she?" he asked of the hall-porter.
"I'm not sure, sir; I think not," said the hall-porter.
The fear that Sophia had already departed made him sick. When he noticed her trunk still there, he took hope and ran upstairs.
He saw her, a dark crumpled, sinuous piece of humanity, half on and half off the bed, silhouetted against the bluish-white counterpane; her hat was on the floor, with the spotted veil trailing away from it. This sight seemed to him to be the most touching that he had ever seen, though her face was hidden. He forgot everything except the deep and strange emotion which affected him. He approached the bed. She did not stir.
Having heard the entry and knowing that it must be Gerald who had entered, Sophia forced herself to remain still. A wild, splendid hope shot up in her. Constrained by all the power of her will not to move, she could not stifle a sob that had lain in ambush in her throat.
The sound of the sob fetched tears to the eyes of Gerald.
"Sophia!" he appealed to her.
But she did not stir. Another sob shook her.
"Very well, then," said Gerald. "We'll stay in London till we can be married. I'll arrange it. I'll find a nice boarding-house for you, and I'll tell the people you're my cousin. I shall stay on at this hotel, and I'll come and see you every day."
A silence.
"Thank you!" she blubbered. "Thank you!"
He saw that her little gloved hand was stretching out towards him, like a feeler; and he seized it, and knelt down and took her clumsily by the waist. Somehow he dared not kiss her yet.
An immense relief surged very slowly through them both.
"I—I—really—" She began to say something, but the articulation was lost in her sobs.
"What? What do you say, dearest?" he questioned eagerly.
And she made another effort. "I really couldn't have gone to Paris with you without being married," she succeeded at last. "I really couldn't."
"No, no!" he soothed her. "Of course you couldn't. It was I who was wrong. But you didn't know how I felt…. Sophia, it's all right now, isn't it?"
She sat up and kissed him fairly.
It was so wonderful and startling that he burst openly into tears. She saw in the facile intensity of his emotion a guarantee of their future happiness. And as he had soothed her, so now she soothed him. They clung together, equally surprised at the sweet, exquisite, blissful melancholy which drenched them through and through. It was remorse for having quarrelled, for having lacked faith in the supreme rightness of the high adventure. Everything was right, and would be right; and they had been criminally absurd. It was remorse; but it was pure bliss, and worth the quarrel! Gerald resumed his perfection again in her eyes! He was the soul of goodness and honour! And for him she was again the ideal mistress, who would, however, be also a wife. As in his mind he rapidly ran over the steps necessary to their marriage, he kept saying to himself, far off in some remote cavern of the brain: "I shall have her! I shall have her!" He did not reflect that this fragile slip of the Baines stock, unconsciously drawing upon the accumulated strength of generations of honest living, had put a defeat upon him.
After tea, Gerald, utterly content with the universe, redeemed his word and found an irreproachable boarding-house for Sophia in Westminster, near the Abbey. She was astonished at the glibness of his lies to the landlady about her, and about their circumstances generally. He also found a church and a parson, close by, and in half an hour the formalities preliminary to a marriage were begun. He explained to her that as she was now resident in London, it would be simpler to recommence the business entirely. She sagaciously agreed. As she by no means wished to wound him again, she made no inquiry about those other formalities which, owing to red-tape, had so unexpectedly proved abortive! She knew she was going to be married, and that sufficed. The next day she carried out her filial idea of telegraphing to her mother.