Chapter ELEVEN

Lois came into the room carrying a small flowered paper bag. ‘Hello, Mado, why are you sitting in this half-darkness?’ She put on the light near the door. ‘I’ve been running round the shops all the afternoon. I’ve bought you this to cheer your black dress up.’

She opened the paper bag and took out a lace collar, touching it with careful fingers.

‘Thank you,’ said Marya in a low voice.

Lois went on: ‘I’m going to dine with Maurice and Anna. And I’m late. I must fly.’ Her eyes, which were swollen as if she had been crying, travelled restlessly round the room. ‘Get H. J. to take you somewhere. He’ll be here in a minute; he’s gone for some cigarettes.’ She turned to walk out of the room.

‘Lois!’ said Marya. And stopped breathless.

‘Well, what is it?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Won’t tomorrow do?’ Lois asked coldly. ‘I’m really in an awful hurry. I don’t want to keep Anna waiting.’

‘Well, it needn’t be a long conversation,’ Marya told her. ‘I want to go, and the sooner the better, don’t you think so? I must ask you to lend me a hundred francs because I haven’t any money left at all. I’ll go at once, and you can tell H. J. that I insisted on it.’

All the time that she spoke she was thinking: ‘This is perfectly useless. She doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. She hates me. She’s going to try to down me. Whatever I do, she’ll hate me and try to down me.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mado,’ said Lois uncertainly. She looked at Marya with the painfully intent expression of a slow-brained person who is trying to think quickly.

‘What’s her game? What’s she up to? I must be clever and try to find out what she’s up to.’

‘Of course, you can’t go.’

‘And why not?’

‘Well,’ asked Lois, ‘where would you go to?’ Her brown eyes were suspicious, troubled like pools when the mud beneath has been stirred up.

‘When I say: go off,’ said Marya, ‘I mean, go right off.’

They watched each other cautiously and steadily for some moments. Then Lois sat down in the chair facing the divan and remarked with calmness:

‘All this, of course, is because H. J.’s been making love to you, I know. I was listening just now, if it comes to that. Well,’ she added defiantly, ‘in my place you’d have done the same thing.’

‘No,’ said Marya.

‘No?’ echoed Lois unbelievingly.

‘I might come into the room and make a hell of a scene, but I’d never listen at the door, because I’ve not got patience enough. We’re different people, Lois.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Lois reluctantly. ‘I suppose we are. But that’s no reason why we should quarrel, is it?’

She began to fidget nervously with the fastening of her handbag.

‘I don’t see what good it will do if you go off. It seems such a pity to smash up all our plans for you, just because H. J. imagines that he’s in love with you--for the minute.’ She went on in a reflective voice: ‘Of course, mind you, he wants things badly when he does want them. He’s a whole hogger.’

‘So am I,’ Marya told her. ‘That’s just why I must go off.’

The other made an impatient and expressive gesture, as if to say: ‘D’you suppose that I care what you are, or think or feel? I’m talking about the man, the male, the important person, the only person who matters.’

‘He’s a whole hogger,’ Lois repeated, ‘and if you go away now he’ll go after you. That’s what he’ll do.’

‘It’s fatal making a fuss,’ she muttered. ‘The more fuss one makes.... I don’t believe in making scenes about things, forcing things. I believe in letting things alone. I hate scenes.’

She stopped. All day she had tormented herself and now she was on the brink of an abyss of sincerity. She twisted her hands in her lap, thinking: Oh, no, my girl, you won’t go away. You’ll stay here where I can keep an eye on you. It won’t last long.... It can’t last long. I’ve always let him alone and given him what he wanted and it’s never failed me. It won’t fail me now. He’ll get tired of her as soon as she gives in. Pretty! She’s revolting. You can see when you look at her that she’s been chewed up. God! what have I done to be worried like this? Didn’t I try to do a decent thing? This is the result; this is what I get for it.

She said bitterly: ‘Of course, I was a fool to have you here, only a fool like me would have done a thing like that, but I don’t see what good your going away now will do.’

Her eyes, when she looked at Marya, were hard, false, questioning. It was as if she were observing some strange animal that might be dangerous, debating the best method of dealing with it.

‘I tell you that I’ll go off,’ said Marya. ‘Tonight, if you like. Right off. What more can I do? I won’t see H. J. again.’

(‘Come, come,’ answered Lois’s eyes. ‘As woman to woman, do you suppose I believe that?’)

‘Well, it’s very dramatic and generous of you and all that,’ she remarked. ‘Why don’t you talk it over with him? I should if I were you. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t see any reason why you should go. I don’t want to send you away and then have it on my conscience that you’ve gone to the devil and all that. Well, that’s what you said, that you didn’t care what happened to you. I thought that a dreadful thing.’

Her voice was so prim that Marya began to laugh, suddenly and loudly. Lois stared at her, got up, went to the looking-glass, arranged her side-locks carefully, and continued in a calm voice:

‘We’re making a great fuss about nothing at all, aren’t we? Drama is catching, I find. In any case, you can’t go tonight.’

Marya asked abruptly: ‘Tell me, did you really say that what is the matter with me is that I am too virtuous?’

‘Well, all this looks rather like it, doesn’t it?’ Lois answered. ‘You must be rather worried about your virtue if you want to rush off at a minute’s notice. Look here, I must be off; I’m horribly late.’

At the door she turned suddenly: ‘What? What did you say?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ Marya lay back and shut her eyes.

Lois was a shadow, less than a shadow. Lois had simply ceased to exist.

The front door banged.

Marya lay very still listening to the hooting of the cars outside. She felt sharply alive but very tired, so languid as to be almost incapable of movement. A profound conviction of the unreality of everything possessed her. She thought: ‘I wonder if taking opium is like this?’

* * * * *

‘Hullo, H. J.,’ she said, and sat up quickly. He was too formidable standing over her. ‘Listen. I’ve been telling Lois that I want to go--I think I’d better.’

‘Oh, I think I’d better,’ she kept on saying in a little, pitiful voice; but when he took her in his arms she thought: ‘How gentle he is. I was lost before I knew him. All my life before I knew him was like being lost on a cold, dark night.’

She shivered. Then she smiled and shut her eyes again.

He whispered: ‘I love you, I love you. What did you say?’

‘That you don’t understand.’

‘Oh, yes, I do, my dear,’ said Heidler. ‘Oh yes, I do.’