The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes. Arnold BennettЧитать онлайн книгу.

CHAPTER VI—The Black Burden

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      Curious! Carpentaria meditated as he retired to his abode. “Having fallen over a man lying drunk on his steps, why should my friend and partner, Mr. Josephus Ilam, totally deny that he has seen a drunken man? With my own eyes I saw him tumble. Now this mishap must have made Mr. Josephus Ilam angry, because he is just the sort of person who does get angry upon the provocation of a pure accident. Yet, so far as I could judge in the gloom, there was no trace of anger in his demeanour when he answered my question. On the contrary, he appeared to be rather subdued.

      “And further—what has become of my friend the drunken man? The drunken man must exist somewhere. Is he in Ilam’s house? And, if so, why is he in Ilam’s house? Neither Josephus nor his mother is precisely a type of the Good Samaritan. And if he is not in Ilam’s house, has he suddenly recovered and walked away on his legs unaided? Impossible! I was once drunk, and I say, impossible. Then, has Josephus carried him somewhere? And where has he carried him, and why?”

      Carpentaria unlocked his front-door and entered the hall of his dwelling, and then locked and bolted the door. He was not in the habit of either locking or bolting his front-door; the idea of so securing a house which stood in the middle of half a square mile of private property, well guarded at all its gates, seemed ridiculous. Nevertheless he did it, and he could have given no reason for doing it. He imagined that he heard footsteps in the passage leading from the hall to the kitchen, and he quickly turned on the electric light and looked down the passage. But there was nothing. He decided that he was very nervous and impressionable that night. The servants had, doubtless, long since gone to bed. He extinguished the light and made his way upstairs to his study, and sat down in his chair—the famous chair in which he composed his famous melodies. The faint illumination of the May night made the principal objects in the room vaguely visible. He could discern the pale square of the framed autograph letter from President McKinley which hung on the opposite wall. He tried to collect his ideas and think in a logical sequence.

      Then, again, he fancied that he heard footsteps, and that he saw a dim form near the door.

      “Who’s that?” he cried sharply.

      “It’s only me,” answered a woman’s voice, and the electricity was at the same instant switched on.

      Juliette stood there.

      “Why are you sitting in the dark, Carlos?” she demanded.

      Carlos was her pet name for him.

      “I don’t know,” he said lamely.

      “My poor dear,” she smiled, approaching him. “I haven’t said good-night to you.”

      She put her long and elegant hands on his shoulders, as was her wont each evening, and kissed him on both cheeks in her French fashion. The affection between Carlos and his half-French half-sister was real and profound. He liked her for her Parisian daintiness, and for the eminently practical qualities which she possessed in common with most Frenchwomen, and also because she regarded him as a genius. To-night he thought she was sweeter and more sisterly than ever.

      “Good-night,” she said, and her voice trembled, and a slight humidity glistened in her eyes.

      “Good-night,” he responded.

      And she tripped off, swinging the perfect skirt of her black mousseline dress round the edge of the door.

      “She’s mightily excited to-night,” he murmured to himself; and he reflected, as all men reflect from time to time, that women are strange and incomprehensible, a device invented by Providence to keep the wit of man well sharpened by constant employment.

      He passed into his bedroom, and went out on to the wooden balcony of the bedroom, which commanded a view of Ilam’s side-door. A light showed through the glass above the door, and Carpentaria noticed at length that the door was slightly ajar. He stepped back into the bedroom, extinguished all his own lights, and returned to the balcony to watch. He determined to watch as long as Ilam’s door remained ajar. He sat down in a cane chair provided for repose on the balcony, and his one regret was that the glow of a cigarette or a cigar would betray him.

      He grew calmer. The frenzy into which music always threw him had quite worn itself away. He was able to think clearly. He did not, however, think so much upon the incident of the drunken man as upon the incident of the bullet; and this was perhaps natural. He was astounded now that he could have remained in the bandstand, so utterly careless of danger, after the arrival of the bullet. He was astounded, too, at the sang-froid of his musicians. But, then, their ears had not been grazed, and his had. He saw that he was at the mercy of any homicidal maniac who, on a dark night, with a good rifle and a sure aim, chose to secrete himself in some deserted alley of the vast Oriental Gardens, and shoot at him during a loud burst of music. And he said: “Well, if I am to die, I am to die, and there’s an end of it. Assuming that a given man A has really determined to kill another given man B, and A is obstinate, nothing will ultimately save B. I am B. Hence I must be philosophical.”

      But who was A?

      He thought of all the enemies he had made, all the rivals he had defeated, but the process of their enumeration was perfunctory. For out of the depths of his mind rose persistently one name, again, and again, and again, and yet again, like a succession of bubbles, all alike, rising to the surface of a pond and breaking there. And that name was the name of Ilam. He forbade the name to rise, but it rose. With the simplicity which marked some of his mental processes, he could not understand why Ilam should hate him murderously. But the episode of the balloon had magically and terribly cast a new and searching light on the recesses of Ham’s character. He felt that hitherto he had been mistaken in Ilam, and that Ilam was not a person with whom it was wise to have interests in common. And the unknown designs of Ilam seemed to surround him in the night like the web of a gigantic spider, and to bind him tighter and tighter.

      Then his reflections were interrupted by a sound somewhere below the balcony.

      It was the sound of his own side-door being very cautiously opened. He could hear it perfectly clearly in the still night; but whether the door was being opened from the outside or the inside he could not tell. He remembered that, though he had bolted and locked the front-door, he had utterly forgotten the side-door. He leaned over the balcony as far as he dared, but even so he could catch no glimpse of anything in the obscurity beneath.

      And then there were steps on the gravel, and he saw a white blur moving on the top of a dark mass. In another moment he perceived that the apparition was Juliette, with a white shawl wrapped round her head. What was she doing there, and why had she opened the door so cautiously? Had she some secret? He decided to watch her. She moved to the middle of the avenue between the two houses and hesitated. And then the great clock in the tower of the Exposition Palace tolled the hour of twelve solemnly, as it were warningly, over the immense extent of the sleeping City of Pleasure.

      The appeal of the clock seemed to Carpentaria to be almost dramatic. He felt strongly that he could not spy upon Juliette, that he could not be disloyal to this affectionate companion of his life,