The Book Of Carlotta (e-book) (used book) | Arnold Bennett | bookbook.eu

Description

CHAPTER I THE HOUSE ENCHANTED 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 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 necessity 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 awav. Never have I seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than that carpet; it was so sweetly faded, ...