Sacred and Profane Love

Sacred And Profane Love

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Title: Sacred And Profane Love
Author: E. Arnold Bennett
Release Date: February 28, 2004 [eBook #11360]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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LOVE ***
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SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
A NOVEL IN THREE EPISODES
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
1905

TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
THE NOVELIST FOR WHOM MAN AND NATURE ARE INSEPARABLE WITH
PROFOUND RESPECT FOR THE CLASSICAL DIGNITY OF HIS AIM AND
EQUAL ADMIRATION FOR THE AUSTERE SPLENDOUR OF HIS
PERFORMANCE

CONTENTS

PART I
IN THE NIGHT

PART II
THREE HUMAN HEARTS

PART III
THE VICTORY

_'How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the past, so beautiful,
so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the kiss, and who are dead! The kiss--it
is immortal! It passes from lip to lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men
gather it, give it back, and die.'_--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE

PART I
IN THE NIGHT

I
For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I mean a noble and
sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all
that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the
eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous
dreams.

I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the piano in the
decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to conceal its age. A generous fire
flamed in the wide grate behind me: warmth has always been to me the first necessary of
life. I turned round on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For even before
beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and the tears had come into my
eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at the room inquiringly, and of course I found
no answer. It was one of those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old
into a sort of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room,
large and stately and symmetrical, full--but not too full--of twisted and tortured
mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery
of the two high windows, and here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled
the Empire period and the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of yellow
and green carpet had been married to the floor by two generations of decorous feet, and
the meaning of its tints was long since explained away. Never have I seen a carpet with
less individuality of its own than that carpet; it was so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat,
that its sole mission in the world seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs. The
wall-paper looked like pale green silk, and the candles were reflected in it as they were
reflected in the crystals of the chandelier. The grand piano, a Collard and Collard, made a
vast mass of walnut in the chamber, incongruous, perhaps, but still there was something
in its mild and indecisive tone that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of
Evangelicalism, the Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence in Christ's blood.
It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion of ideas. It, too, protested against
Chopin and romance, and demanded Thalberg's variations on 'Home, Sweet Home.'
My great-grandfather, the famous potter--second in renown only to Wedgwood--had built
that Georgian house, and my grandfather had furnished it; and my parents, long since
dead, had placidly accepted it and the ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my
Aunt Constance, and ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a dress of
virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and blameless families, the
secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I come there?
I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out into the damp,
black garden, from which the last light was fading. The red, rectangular house stood in
the midst