Chapter TWO

Marya, you must understand, had not been suddenly and ruthlessly transplanted from solid comfort to the hazards of Montmartre. Nothing like that. Truth to say, she was used to a lack of solidity and of fixed backgrounds.

Before her marriage she had spent several years as a member of Mr Albert Prance’s No. 1 touring company. An odd life. Morose landladies, boiled onion suppers. Bottles of gin in the dressing-room. Perpetual manicuring of one’s nails in the Sunday train. Perpetual discussions about men. (‘Swine, deary, swine.’) The chorus knew all about men, judged them with a rapid and terrible accuracy.

Marya had longed to play a glittering part--she was nineteen then--against the sombre and wonderful background of London. She had visited a theatrical agent; she had sung--something--anything--in a quavering voice, and the agent, a stout and weary gentleman, had run his eyes upwards and downwards and remarked in a hopeless voice: ‘Well, you’re no Tetrazzini, are you, deary? Never mind, do a few steps.’

She had done a few steps. The stout gentleman had glanced at another gentleman standing behind the piano, who was, it seemed, Mr Albert Prance’s manager. Both nodded slightly. A contract was produced. The thing was done.

‘Miss--I say, what d’you call yourself?--Miss Marya Hughes, hereinafter called the artist.’

Clause 28: no play, no pay.

The next day she attended her first rehearsal and listened to the musical director bawling, with a resigned expression: ‘Sopranos on my right, contraltos on my left.’

Mr Albert Prance himself had a curved nose, a large stomach and a long black moustache. He watched the rehearsals and would occasionally make a short speech. Something like this:

‘Ladies and gentlemen. This play wants guts!’

He terrified Marya; her knees shook whenever he came anywhere near her.

Sometimes she would reflect that the way she had been left to all this was astonishing, even alarming. When she had pointed out that, without expensive preliminaries, she would be earning her own living, everybody had stopped protesting and had agreed that this was a good argument. A very good argument indeed. For Marya’s relatives, though respectable people, presentable people (one might even go so far as to say quite good people), were poverty-stricken and poverty is the cause of many compromises.

There she was and there she stayed. Gradually passivity replaced her early adventurousness. She learned, after long and painstaking effort, to talk like a chorus girl, to dress like a chorus girl and to think like a chorus girl--up to a point. Beyond that point she remained apart, lonely, frightened of her loneliness, resenting it passionately. She grew thin. She began to live her hard and monotonous life very mechanically and listlessly.

A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike. One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn’t what one had expected of life. Not in the very least.

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old. Then, during a period of unemployment spent in London, she met Monsieur Stephan Zelli.

He was a short, slim, supple young man of thirty-three or four, with very quick, bright brown eyes and an eager but secretive expression. He spoke English fairly well in a harsh voice and (when he was nervous) with an American accent.

He told Marya that he was of Polish nationality, that he lived in Paris, that he considered her beautiful and wished to marry her. Also that he was a _commissionaire d’objets d’art_.

‘Oh, you sell pictures,’ she said.

‘Pictures and other things.’

* * * * *

Marya, who had painfully learnt a certain amount of caution, told herself that this stranger and alien was probably a bad lot. But she felt strangely peaceful when she was with him, as if life was not such an extraordinary muddle after all, as if he were telling her: ‘Now then, look here, I know all about you. I know you far better than you know yourself. I know why you aren’t happy. I can make you happy.’

And he was so sure of himself, so definite, with such a clean-cut mind. It was a hard mind, perhaps, disconcertingly and disquietingly sceptical. But at any rate it didn’t bulge out in all sorts of unexpected places. Most people hesitated. They fumbled. They were so full of reticences and prejudices and uncertainties and spites and shames, that there was no getting anywhere at all. One felt after a time a blankness and a jar--like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there. But, good or bad, there Monsieur Zelli was. Definite. A person. He criticized her clothes with authority and this enchanted her. He told her that her arms were too thin, that she had a Slav type and a pretty silhouette, that if she were happy and petted she would become charming. Happy, petted, charming--these are magical words. And the man knew what he was talking about, Marya could see that.

As to Monsieur Zelli, he drew his own conclusions from her air of fatigue, disillusion and extreme youth, her shadowed eyes, her pathetic and unconscious lapses into helplessness. But he was without bourgeois prejudices, or he imagined that he was, and he had all his life acted on impulse, though always in a careful and business-like manner.

* * * * *

It was the end of a luncheon in Soho. Marya finished smoking her cigarette and remarked.

‘You know I haven’t got any money, not a thing, not a cent.’

She said this because, when he had leaned forward with the lighted match, he had reminded her of China Audley’s violinist.

China, also one of Mr Prance’s discoveries, was beloved by a tall, fine-looking young man with a large income and a charming voice. A chivalrous young man. He had fought the good fight with his mother, who considered that honourable intentions were unnecessary when dealing with chorus girls. There the two were--engaged.

Then China had madly jilted this marvel, this paragon, and had secretly married the short, swarthy violinist of a Manchester café. She had spent the rest of the tour getting telegraphic appeals from her husband; ‘Please send five pounds at once Antonio,’ or something like that. Which entailed putting her wrist watch into various pawnshops and taking it out again. Constantly. ‘Well it serves her right, doesn’t it?’ said all the other girls.

‘No money. Nothing at all,’ repeated Marya. ‘My father and mother are both dead. My aunt....’

‘I know; you told me,’ interrupted Monsieur Zelli, who had long ago asked adroit questions and found out all there was to find out about Marya’s relations. He had reflected that they didn’t seem to care in the least what became of her and that English ideas of family life were sometimes exceedingly strange. But he had made no remark.

‘It’s a pity,’ said Monsieur Zelli. ‘It’s better when a woman has some money, I think. It’s much safer for her.’

‘I owe for the dress I have on,’ Marya informed him, for she was determined to make things perfectly clear.

He told her that they would go next day and pay for it.

‘How much do you owe?’

‘It’s not worth that,’ he remarked calmly when she told him. ‘Not that it is ugly, but it has no chic. I expect your dressmaker cheats you.’

Marya was annoyed but impressed.

‘You know--you’ll be happy with me,’ he continued in a persuasive voice.

And Marya answered that she dared say she would.

* * * * *

On a June afternoon, heavy with heat, they arrived in Paris.

* * * * *

Stephan had lived in Montmartre for fifteen years, he told her, but he had no intimate friends and very few acquaintances. Sometimes he took her with him to some obscure café where he would meet an odd-looking old man or a very smartly-dressed young one. She would sit in the musty-smelling half-light sipping iced beer and listening to long, rapid jabberings: ‘_La Vierge au coussin vert--Première version--Authentique--Documents--Collier de l’Impératrice Eugénie_....’

‘An amethyst necklace, the stones as big as a calf’s eye and set in gold. The pendant pear-shaped, the size of a pigeon’s egg. The necklace is strung on a fine gold chain and set with pearls of an extraordinary purity.’ The whole to be hung as quickly as possible round the neck of Mrs Buckell A. Butcher of something-or-the-other, Pa, or of any lady willing to put up with an old-fashioned piece of jewellery, because _impératrice_ is a fine word and even empress isn’t so bad.

Stephan seemed to do most of his business in cafés. He explained that he acted as intermediary between Frenchmen who wished to sell and foreigners (invariably foreigners) who wished to buy pictures, fur coats, twelfth-century Madonnas, Madame du Barry’s prie-Dieu, anything.

Once he had sold a rocking-horse played with by one of Millet’s many children, and that had been a very profitable deal indeed.

One evening she had come home to find Napoleon’s sabre lying naked and astonishing on her bed by the side of its cedar-wood case.

(‘_Oui, parfaitement_,’ said Stephan. ‘Napoleon’s sabre.’)

One of his sabres, she supposed. He must have had several of them, of course. A man like Napoleon. Lots. She walked round to the other side of the bed and stared at it, feeling vaguely uneasy. There was a long description of the treasure on the cedar-wood case.

‘There are two sheaths, the first of porcelain inlaid with gold, the second of gold set with precious stones. The hilt of the sabre is in gold worked in the Oriental fashion. The blade is of the finest Damascus steel and on it is engraved: “In token of submission, respect and esteem to Napoleon Bonaparte, the hero of Aboukir--Mouhrad Bey”.’

That night, long after the cedar-wood case had been packed away in a shabby valise, Marya lay awake thinking.

‘Stephan,’ she said at last.

‘Well?’ answered Stephan. He was smoking in front of the open window. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘No,’ said Marya. ‘Wherever did you get that thing?’

He explained that it belonged to an old French family.

‘They’re very poor now and they want to sell it. That’s all. Why don’t they what? The man has to do it on the sly because his mother and his uncle would stop him if they could.’

Marya sat up in bed, put her arms round her knees and said in an unhappy voice:

‘He probably has no right to sell it without his mother’s consent.’

‘His mother has nothing to say,’ remarked Stephan sharply. ‘But she would bother him if she could.’

Next morning he went out very early, carrying the old valise, and Marya never knew what became of the sabre.

‘America,’ said Stephan vaguely when she asked. As who should say ‘The sea.’

He never explained his doings. He was a secretive person, she considered. Sometimes, without warning or explanation, he would go away for two or three days, and, left alone in the hotel, she dreaded, not desertion, but some vague, dimly-apprehended catastrophe. But nothing happened. It was a fantastic life, but it kept on its legs so to speak. There was no catastrophe. And eventually Marya stopped questioning and was happy.

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan--or so he made her believe. Marya hadn’t known that a man could be as nice as all that to a woman--so gentle in little ways.

And, besides, she liked him. She liked his wild gaieties and his sudden, obstinate silences and the way he sometimes stretched his hands out to her. Groping. Like a little boy, she would think.

Eighteen months later they went to Brussels for a year. By the time they returned to Paris every vestige of suspicion had left her. She felt that her marriage, though risky, had been a success. And that was that. Her life swayed regularly, even monotonously, between two extremes, avoiding the soul-destroying middle. Sometimes they had a good deal of money and immediately spent it. Sometimes they had almost none at all and then they would skip a meal and drink iced white wine on their balcony instead.

From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche. Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre. It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.

The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking.

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.