Chapter TWELVE

The three dined together at Lefranc’s the next evening. They sat, as usual, at a table in a little alcove at the end of the room, and Monsieur Lefranc (also as usual) hovered about them attentively. Monsieur Lefranc admired Lois Heidler. He considered her a good-looking woman, a sensible, tidy, well-dressed woman who knew how to appreciate food. Marya he distrusted, and he had told his wife so more than once. ‘And who is she, that one?’ he would say. On this particular evening, then, he served first the soup and then the fish with his own hands and asked:

‘_Ça vous plait, Madame Heidler?_’

‘Oh, very nice, very nice,’ answered Lois.

Then Monsieur Lefranc cast one astute glance at her deeply circled eyes, another at Marya’s reflection in the glass and told himself: ‘_Ça y est._ I knew it! Ah, the _grue_!’ So he waited on Lois with sympathy and gentleness; he waited on Marya grimly, and when he looked at Heidler, his expression said: ‘Come, come, my dear sir. As man to man, what a mistake you’re making!’

Madame Lefranc, from behind her bar, was also watching the trio with interest and curiosity. But she beamed on Marya every bit as kindly as she beamed on Lois, for she was a plump and placid woman who never took sides, and when her husband (a very moral man) judged a female client with severity, she would often say: ‘Life is very droll. One never knows, Josef, one never knows.’

Marya was unconscious of Monsieur Lefranc’s hostility. She was absorbed, happy, without thought for perhaps the first time in her life. No past. No future. Nothing but the present: the flowers on the table, the taste of wine in her mouth. She glanced at the rough texture of Heidler’s coat-sleeve and longed to lay her face against it.

Lois, however, instantly reacting to the atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement, sat very straight, dominating the situation and talking steadily in a cool voice.

‘We must get Mado another hat, H. J.’

Heidler looked sideways at Marya cautiously and critically.

‘She must be chic,’ his wife went on. ‘She must do us credit.’ She might have been discussing the dressing of a doll.

‘Let’s go to Luna-park after dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ll put Mado on the joy wheel, and watch her being banged about a bit. Well, she ought to amuse us sometimes; she ought to sing for her supper; that’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’

Heidler’s face was expressionless. It was impossible to tell whether this badinage amused or annoyed him.

‘Well, shall we go to Luna-park?’ persisted Lois.

‘No,’ answered Heidler reflectively. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

Lois said in a high, excited voice that she was bored to death with Montparnasse.

‘I’m bored, bored, bored! Look here. Let’s go to a music-hall, the _promenoir_ of a music-hall, that’s what I feel like. Something _canaille_, what?’

* * * * *

Two naked girls were dancing before a background of blue and mauve which was like a picture by Marie Laurencin.

‘If they’d only keep still,’ Marya thought. ‘They would be awfully nice if they were perfectly still.’

But the girls hopped with persistence. She looked away from the stage at an enormously stout lady promenading in a black and salmon georgette dress. The lady was worth watching. She had the head of a Roman emperor and she paced up and down with great dignity, glancing at various men with a good-natured but relentless expression.

The two girls having pranced smilingly off the stage, the curtain fell and rose again on the Spanish singer who was the star of the evening: a slim creature in a black crinoline gown, who wore her hair swept away from her face and ears. She was charming. She was like some frail and passionate child, and she sang her songs simply in a sweet, small voice.

‘Oh, what a darling!’ said Marya after the first song. But Lois ejaculated at intervals:

‘Oh, very disappointing. Most!’ and finally announced that she wanted to go to the Select Bar (the Montparnasse one) and eat a Welsh rarebit.

That night the place seemed to be full of red-haired ladies in _robes de style_. Mr Blinks, the brilliant American, was balancing himself on a stool at one end of the bar. Guy Lester was at the other end, very drunk. All the dear old familiar faces, as Lois said.

‘But a bit pink-eyed. Or are they not? Perhaps I just think they are because I’m in a bad temper.’ She began to disparage the Spaniard at length: ‘Not half fine gel enough, was she?’

‘Did you like her, Mado?’ asked Heidler.

‘Yes, I did, very much.’

‘Oh, charming!’ said Lois. Her voice went up a semitone. ‘But small, small. I liked the dancers rather.’

Marya remarked in a cold, hostile way that she thought the dancers were bouncers.

‘Hate bouncers!’

‘I don’t see,’ went on Lois, ‘what the girl was driving at, myself. She tries to get an atmosphere of fate and terror. The weak creature doomed and all that--such nonsense. And, besides, she doesn’t do it. That song where she stabbed her lover, for instance. You don’t stab a man with a little feeble gesture and a sweet and simple smile.’

Heidler said: ‘Lois doesn’t believe in fate, and she doesn’t approve of weakness.’

‘Oh, it’s a damn convenient excuse sometimes,’ answered Lois. The two women stared coldly at each other.

‘After all,’ remarked Marya suddenly, ‘weak, weak, how does anybody really know who’s weak and who isn’t? You don’t need to be a fine bouncing girl to stab anybody, either. The will to stab would be the chief thing, I should think.’

Heidler coughed.

‘Have some more stout,’ he said; ‘have another Welsh rarebit.’ He added with relief: ‘Come along over here, Guy.’

Guy, who was a tall and beautiful and willowy young man, came along. He fixed a severe, slightly bleared blue eye on Marya and declared that he thought she was a hussy. He was very drunk.

‘I’m young and innocent,’ said Guy, ‘but I know a hussy when I see one.’

‘Darling Marya,’ said Lois, laughing on a high note. ‘You don’t know her, you don’t. She’s as harmless as they’re made, Guy. A sweet young thing on the sentimental side.’

‘And one word to you both,’ thought Marya. The music-hall had excited her. She felt pugnacious. She sat silent with a sullen, resentful expression on her face. From time to time Heidler looked at her under his eyebrows with clever, cautious eyes.

Lois began: ‘There was a young woman called Marya. Who thought, “But I must have a caree--er.”’ And so on and so on....

* * * * *

They walked home along the street which runs close to the Luxembourg Gardens, empty, silent and enchanted in the darkness.

‘Good night, you two,’ said Lois when they got to the studio. She went to her room and locked the door.

* * * * *

‘H. J.,’ said Marya. ‘It’s no use. I can’t go on with this. I can’t stick it. It isn’t my line at all.’

‘But that’s not playing the game, is it?’ remarked Heidler, in an impersonal voice. ‘Not any sort of game.’

‘What game?’ answered Marya fiercely. ‘Your game? Lois’s game? Why should I play Lois’s game? Yes, that is just it, it’s all a game I can’t play, that I don’t know how to play.’

He said: ‘You’re making a stupid mistake, a really tragic mistake about Lois. I tell you that you misunderstand her utterly. You will persist in judging us by the standards of the awful life you’ve lived. Can’t you understand that you are in a different world now? People breed differently after a while, you know. You won’t be let down. There’s no trick, no trap. You’re with friends. And look here, my dear, what’s the use of starting this conversation at this time of night? We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Lois doesn’t want to be given away; she doesn’t want anybody to know, and I assure you that that’s all she cares about. Of course, she’ll be furious if anybody knows, and that’s why if you go off in a hurry you will make things difficult for me. I beg you not to make things so difficult for me.’

She felt hypnotized as she listened to him, impotent.

* * * * *

As she lay in bed she longed for her life with Stephan as one longs for vanished youth. A gay life, a carefree life just wiped off the slate as it were. Gone! A horrible nostalgia, an ache for the past seized her.

_Nous n’irons plus au bois;
Les lauriers sont coupés...._

Gone, and she was caught in this appalling muddle. Life was like that. Here you are, it said, and then immediately afterwards: Where are you? Her life, at any rate, had always been like that.

‘Of course,’ she told herself, ‘I ought to clear out.’

But when she thought of an existence without Heidler her heart turned over in her side and she felt sick.

A board creaked outside.

She watched the handle of the door turning very gently, very slowly. And during the few moments that passed from the time she heard the board creak to the time she saw Heidler and said, ‘Oh, it’s you then, it’s you,’ she was in a frenzy of senseless fright. Fright of a child shut up in a dark room. Fright of an animal caught in a trap.’

‘What is it? What is it, then?’ whispered Heidler. ‘My darling! There, there, there!’