The Pretty Lady by Arnold Bennett (top 10 most read books in the world .TXT) 📖

I'm glad it's a success. But the machinery of it is perhaps just slightly out of proportion to the results. If people had given to the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what they've paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls, we should have made twenty times as much as we have made--a hundred times as much. Why, good god! Queen, the whole afternoon's takings wouldn't buy what you're wearing now, to say nothing of the five hundred other women here." His eye rested on the badge of her half-brother's regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds.

At this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice as "G.J., old soul." An officer with the solitary crown on his sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched him--much gentler than he spoke--on the shoulder.

"Craive, my son! You back! Well, it's startling to see you at a picture-show, anyhow."

The Major, saluting Lady Queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted:

"Morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear G.J. I called at the flat, and the young woman there told me you'd surely be here."

While they were talking G.J. could hear Queenie Paulle and Molder:

"Where are you back from?"

"Suvla, Lady Queenie."

"You must be oozing with interest and actuality. Tell G.J. to bring you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? _I_'ll tell him." And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional. G.J. showed decorously that he had caught his own name. Whereupon Lady Queenie, instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly:

"G.J., what's come over you? What in the name of Pan do you suppose all you males are fighting each other for?" She paused effectively. "Good god! If I began to dress like a housemaid the Germans would be in London in a month. Our job as women is quite delicate enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental superficiality.... I want you to bring Mr. Molder to tea _to-morrow_, and if you can't come he must come alone...."

With a last strange look at Molder she retired into the glitter of the crowded larger room.

"She been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?" Major Craive demanded acidly under his breath.

G.J. raised his eyebrows.

Then: "That's not _you_, Frankie!" said the Major with a start of recognition towards the Staff lieutenant.

"Yes, sir," said Molder.

They shook hands. At the previous Christmas they had lain out together on the cliffs of the east coast in wild weather, waiting to repel a phantom army of thirty thousand Germans.

"It was the red hat put me off," the Major explained.

"Not my fault, sir," Molder smiled.

"Devilish glad to see you, my boy."

G.J. murmured to Molder:

"You don't want to go and have tea with her, do you?"

And Molder answered, with the somewhat fatuous, self-conscious grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a good-looking fellow who knows that he has made an impression:

"Well, I don't know--"

G.J. raised his eyebrows again, but with indulgence, and winked at Craive.

The Major shut his lips tight, then stood with his mouth open for a second or two in the attitude of a man suddenly receiving the onset of a great and original idea.

"She's right, hang it all!" he exclaimed. "She's right! Of course she is! Why, what's all this"--he waved an arm at the whole scene--"what's all this but sex? Look at 'em! And look at their portraits! You aren't going to tell me! What's the good of pretending? Hang it all, when my own aunt comes down to breakfast in a low-cut blouse that would have given her fits even in the evening ten years ago!... And jolly fine too. I'm all for it. The more of it the merrier--that's what I say. And don't any of you high-brows go trying to alter it. If you do I retire, and you can defend your own bally Front."

"Craive," said G.J. affectionately, "until you and Queen came along Molder and I really thought we were at a picture exhibition, and we still think so, don't we, Molder?" The Lieutenant nodded. "Now, as you're here, just let me show you one or two things."

"Oh!" breathed the Major, "have pity. It's not any canvas woman that I want--By Jove!" He caught sight of an invention of Felicien Rops, a pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "What do you call that?"

"My dear fellow, that's one of the most famous etchings in the world."

"Is it?" the Major said. "Well, I'm not surprised. There's more in this business than I imagined." He set himself to examine all the exhibits by Rops, and when he had finished he turned to G.J.

"Listen here, G.J. We're going to make a night of it. I've decided on that."

"Sorry, dear heart," said G.J. "I'm engaged with Molder to-night. We shall have some private chamber-music at my rooms--just for ourselves. You ought to come. Much better for your health."

"What time will the din be over?"

"About eleven."

"Now I say again--listen here. Let's talk business. I'll come to your chamber-music. I've been before, and survived, and I'll come again. But afterwards you'll come with me to the Guinea-Fowl."

"But, my dear chap, I can't throw Molder out into Vigo Street at eleven o'clock," G.J. protested, startled by the blunt mention of the notorious night-club in the young man's presence.

"Naturally you can't. He'll come along with us. Frankie and I have nearly fallen into the North Sea or German Ocean together, haven't we, Frankie? It'll be my show. And I'll turn up with the stuff--one, two or three pretty ladies according as your worship wishes."

G.J. was now more than startled; he was shocked; he felt his cheeks reddening. It was the presence of Molder that confused him. Never had he talked to Molder on any subjects but the arts, and if they had once or twice lighted on the topic of women it was only in connection with the arts. He was really interested in and admired Molder's unusual aesthetic intelligence, and he had done what he could to foster it, and he immensely appreciated Molder's youthful esteem for himself. Moreover, he was easily old enough to be Molder's father. It seemed to him that though two generations might properly mingle in anything else, they ought not to mingle in licence. Craive's crudity was extraordinary.

"See here!" Craive went on, serious and determined. "You know the sort of thing I've come from. I got four days unexpected. I had to run down to my uncle's. The old things would have died if I hadn't. To-morrow I go back. This is my last night. I haven't had a scratch up to now. But my turn's coming, you bet. Next week I may be in heaven or hell or anywhere, or blind for life or without my legs or any damn thing you please. But I'm going to have to-night, and you're going to join in."

G.J. saw the look of simple, half-worshipful appeal that sometimes came into Craive's rather ingenuous face. He well knew that look, and it always touched him. He remembered certain descriptive letters which he had received from Craive at the Front,--they corresponded faithfully. He could not have explained the intimacy of his relations with Craive. They had begun at a club, over cards. The two had little in common--Craive was a stockbroker when world-wars did not happen to be in progress--but G.J. greatly liked him because, with all his crudity, he was such a decent, natural fellow, so kind-hearted, so fresh and unassuming. And Craive on his part had developed an admiration for G.J. which G.J. was quite at a loss to account for. The one clue to the origin of the mysterious attachment between them had been a naive phrase which he had once overheard Craive utter to a mutual acquaintance: "Old G.J.'s so subtle, isn't he?"

G.J. said to himself, reconsidering the proposal:

"And why on earth not?"

And then aloud, soothingly, to Craive:

"All right! All right!"

The Major brightened and said to Molder:

"You'll come, of course?"

"Oh, rather!" answered Molder, quite simply.

And G.J., again to himself, said:

"I am a simpleton."

The Major's pleading, and the spectacle of the two officers with their precarious hold on life, humiliated G.J. as well as touched him. And, if only in order to avoid the momentary humiliation, he would have been well content to be able to roll back his existence and to have had a military training and to be with them in the sacred and proud uniform.

"Now listen here!" said the Major. "About the aforesaid pretty ladies--"

There they stood together in the corner, hiding several of Rops's eccentricities, ostensibly discussing art, charity, world-politics, the strategy of war, the casualty lists.


Chapter 23


THE CALL

Christine found the night at the guinea-fowl rather dull. The supper-room, garish and tawdry in its decorations, was functioning as usual. The round tables and the square tables, the tables large and the tables small, were well occupied with mixed parties and couples. Each table had its own yellow illumination, and the upper portion of the room, with a certain empty space in the centre of it, was bafflingly shadowed. Between two high, straight falling curtains could be seen a section of the ball-room, very bright against the curtains, with the figures of dancers whose bodies seemed to be glued to each other, pale to black or pale to khaki, passing slowly and rhythmically across. The rag-time music, over a sort of ground-bass of syncopated tom-tom, surged through the curtains like a tide of the sea of Aphrodite, and bathed everyone at the supper-tables in a mysterious aphrodisiacal fluid. The waiters alone were insensible to its influence. They moved to and fro with the impassivity and disdain of eunuchs separated for ever from the world's temptations. Loud laughs or shrill little shrieks exploded at intervals from the sinister melancholy of the interior.

On Christine's left, at a round table in a corner, sat G.J.; on her right, the handsome boy Molder. On Molder's right, Miss Aida Altown spread her amplitude, and on G.J.'s left was a young girl known to the company as Alice. Major Craive, the host, the splendid quality of whose hospitality was proved by the flowers, the fruit, the bottles, the cigar-boxes and the cigarette-boxes on the table, sat between Alice and Aida Altown.

The three women on principle despised and scorned each other with false warm smiles and sudden outbursts of compliment. Christine knew that the other two detested her as being "one of those French girls" who, under the protection of Free Trade, came to London and, by their lack of scruple and decency, took the bread out of the mouths of the nice, modest, respectable, English girls. She on her side disdained both of them, not merely because they were courtesans (which somehow Christine considered she really was not), but also for their characteristic insipidity, lackadaisicalness and ignorance of the technique of the profession. They expected to be paid for doing nothing.

Aida Altown she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival Promenade. Aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which Christine always feared. Despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful woman in the English manner, blonde, soft, idle,