Christmas Holiday by W. Somerset Maugham

Author:W. Somerset Maugham [Maugham, W. Somerset]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78711-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

vi

THEY DID NOT WAKE till so late next morning that by the time they had had their coffee, read the papers (like a domestic couple who had been married for years), bathed and dressed, it was nearly one.

“We might go along and have a cocktail at the Dôme and then lunch,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“There’s a very good restaurant on the boulevard in the other direction from the Coupole. Only it’s rather expensive.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter.”

“Are you sure?” She looked at him doubtfully. “I don’t want you to spend more than you can afford. You’ve been very sweet to me. I’m afraid I’ve taken advantage of your kindness.”

“Oh, rot!” he answered, flushing.

“You don’t know what it’s meant to me, these two days. Such a rest. Last night’s the first night for months that I’ve slept without waking and without dreams. I feel so refreshed. I feel quite different.”

She did indeed look much better this morning. Her skin was clearer and her eyes brighter. She held her head more alertly.

“It’s been a wonderful little holiday you’ve given me. It’s helped me so much. But I mustn’t be a burden to you.”

“You haven’t been.”

She smiled with gentle irony.

“You’ve been very well brought up, my dear. It’s nice of you to say that, and I’m so unused to having people say nice things to me that it makes me want to cry. But after all you’ve come to Paris to have a good time; you know now you’re not likely to have it with me. You’re young and you must enjoy your youth. It lasts so short a while. Give me lunch to-day if you like and this afternoon I’ll go back to Alexey’s.”

“And to-night to the Sérail?”

“I suppose so.”

She sighed, but she checked the sigh and with a little gay shrug of the shoulders gave him a bright smile. Frowning slightly in his uncertainty Charley looked at her with pained eyes. He felt awkward and big, and his radiant health, his sense of well-being, the high spirits that bubbled inside him, seemed to himself in an odd way an offence. He was like a rich man vulgarly displaying his wealth to a poor relation. She looked very frail, a slim little thing in a shabby brown dress, and after that good night so much younger that she seemed almost a child. How could you help being sorry for her? And when you thought of her tragic story, when you thought—oh, unwillingly, for it was ghastly and senseless, yet troubling so that it haunted you—of that crazy idea of hers of atoning for her husband’s crime by her own degradation, your heart-strings were wrung. You felt that you didn’t matter at all, and if your holiday in Paris, to which you’d looked forward with such excitement, was a wash-out—well, you just had to put up with it. It didn’t seem to Charley that it was he who was uttering the halting words he spoke, but a power within him that acted independently of his will.

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