The House in Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

well between walls, with one tree whose outline showed through the blind.
    'Then try to sleep, Henrietta,' said Miss Fisher. 'Remember, you will be travelling again tonight.'
    'I want to go out soon.'
    'Paris won't run away,' said Miss Fisher. Her voice trailed off; she melted out of the room.
    That image of streets in furtive chaotic flight, and of the Seine panorama being rolled up, was frightening for the first minute; then a lassitude in which reedy fantasies wavered began like smoke to fill Henrietta's brain. She relaxed more on the sofa, shutting her eyes. But she could not hear the clock without seeing the pendulum, with that bright hypnotic disc at its tip, which set the beat of her thoughts till they were not thoughts. Steps crossed the ceiling and stopped somewhere: was Miss Fisher standing by her sick mother's bed? She can't be dying, she wants to know about me. The stern dying go on out without looking back; sleepers go out a short way, never not hearing the vibrations of Paris, a sea-like stirring, horns, echoes indoors, electric bells making stars in the grey swinging silence that never perfectly settles in volutions of streets and empty courts of stone.
    Henrietta, waking, opened her eyes.
    Leopold said, 'I didn't know you were in here.'
    He had come well into the room, and might have been there some time. He was still part of the dream she had not quite had.
    'Have I been asleep long?'
    'I don't know when you went to sleep.'
    'Soon after I came here.'
    'Yes, I heard you come. About three hours ago.'
    'Then where did you think I was?'
    'I thought I would find out.'
    Going back to shut the door, which was open, Leopold added, 'As a matter of fact, she told me not to come in here.'
    Having shut the door, Leopold walked across to the mantelpiece, which he stood with his back to, looking at Henrietta with no signs of shyness, in a considering way. He had a nervous manner, but was clearly too much taken up with himself to be frightened of anyone. She saw a dark-eyed, very slight little boy who looked either French or Jewish; his nose had a high, fine bridge and his hair grew up in a crest, then lay down again; he had the stately waxen impersonal air of a royal child in a picture centuries old. He wore a bunchy stiff dark blue sailor blouse, blue knickerbockers and rather ugly black socks ... Henrietta, sitting up on the sofa, pushed into place more firmly the semi-circular comb that held back her hair.
     

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    Henrietta, composedly sitting up on the sofa, pushing the curved comb back, made Leopold think of a little girl he had once seen in a lithograph, bowling a hoop in a park with her hair tied on the top of her head in an old-fashioned way. His own inner excitement was so great that nothing outside, in this house, struck him as odd at all. But he had seen, from the way she had lain stretched on the sofa before waking, that even in sleep Henrietta was being exposed to unfamiliar sensation. She had lain, hair hanging down, like someone in a new element, a conjurer's little girl levitated, rigid on air, her very sleep wary. But now she woke, her manner at once took on a touch of clear-sighted, over-riding good sense, like Alice's throughout Wonderland. She might marvel, but nothing, thought Leopold, would ever really happen to her.
    He said: 'Miss Fisher says you're here for the day.'
    'I'm just crossing Paris,' Henrietta said with cosmopolitan ease.
    'Is that your monkey?'
    'Yes. I've had him ever since I was born.'
    'Oh,' said Leopold, looking at Charles vaguely.
    'How old are you?' Henrietta inquired.
    'Nine.'
    'Oh, I'm eleven.'
    'Miss Fisher's mother is very ill,' said Leopold. He sat down in an armchair with his knees crossed and, bending forward, studied a cut on one knee. The four velvet armchairs, each pulled out a little way from a corner, faced in on the round table that reflected the window and had in its centre a tufted chenille mat. He added, wrinkling his forehead: 'So Mariette says, at least.'
    'Who is