Chapter TWENTY-ONE

The beach was strewn with old sardine tins and fishing nets spread to dry in the sun. A little white boat, called _Je m’en fous_, heaved very slowly up and down at the end of its rope. Beyond the pebbles and the sardine tins the sea was the colour of a field of blue hyacinths.

Marya lay in the sun hour after hour and her thoughts were vague and pale, like ghosts. At the back of the beach a sparse line of eucalyptus trees danced gaily in the wind. Sometimes a brown, sturdy fisherwoman or a thin yellow dog would pass and look down on her, lying motionless with one arm over her eyes.

‘But you ought to go to Nice, Madame,’ said the landlady of the Hôtel des Palmiers. She was pretty, dark and fat, and she enjoyed relating the complicated history of her inside. ‘_Hélas!_ What it is to be a woman,’ she would say at the finish.

‘I don’t like Nice,’ answered Marya.

‘The tram stops outside the door every twenty minutes,’ continued the landlady, ignoring, as was proper, her client’s last foolish remark.

‘Well,’ said Marya suddenly, ‘I’ll go this afternoon; why not?’

* * * * *

In Nice the sun blazed down on the white houses along the sea front and the strong-winged gulls swooped and dived gracefully, and the stone ladies smiled complacently from the front of the Hôtel Negresco, as if to say: ‘Think what you like, curves are charming.’ There was a sort of sweet reasonableness in the very air; everything logical, arranged, purposeful, under a surface of grace, lightness and gaiety. Life as it should be lived.

Marya sat in an empty café out of the sun and looked for a long time at the blank sheet of writing paper in front of her, imagining it covered with words, black marks on the white paper. Words. To make somebody understand.

‘I must make him understand,’ she thought. Then wrote slowly:

_Dear Heidler_,

_I am horribly unhappy. I’m simply going mad down here. When I think
of you and Lois together I really feel as if I were going mad. You
don’t believe me. I can see you smiling. But it’s true. It’s as if
all the blood in my body is being drained, very slowly, all the time,
all the blood in my heart. What can I say to make you believe me?
I can’t think properly any more. I’m_ fichue. _Please be patient
with me. But I want to go back to Paris; I shouldn’t have come down
here. Surely you must see that. I mean, will you send enough money
for me to go back to Paris and live there for a week or two? That’s
all I want of you. It was like drinking something very bitter to the
last drop when I wrote that. And now I know that I’m nothing at all.
Nothing. Nothing. But I did love you. If I were dying, that would
be the last thing I would say, that I loved you. That’s one of the
things that torments me, that I don’t believe you ever knew how much I
loved you. Well, and I can see you smiling at all this. My dear, my
dear, for God’s sake, send me the money at once and let me go. I’m
being tormented here. Please._

‘That’s a rotten letter,’ thought Marya. She sighed and asked the waiter for more paper. And, seeing that he looked sulky: ‘And another _café crême_, take this one away.’

The waiter looked at the first glass of coffee, cold and untouched, raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and departed, dragging his feet. As she waited for him, Marya watched a fierce-eyed, beak-nosed girl opposite who was also writing rapidly. As she wrote, tears came to her eyes. Probably a letter of rupture. When the waiter came back with the coffee and the paper Marya had addressed her letter.

‘I can’t write it again,’ she thought.

She paid him and went out, leaving him staring after her and smiling. But as soon as she had posted her incoherent epistle she felt relieved and even peaceful. She went back to the Hôtel des Palmiers and lay in her bedroom with her eyes shut, thinking: ‘I ought to have an answer in four or five days. I must have an answer.’

It was a large bedroom with a stone-flagged floor, and the palm trees leant in a friendly fashion almost through the windows of the room. Outside in the passage the little _bonne_, Marya’s namesake, sang as she mopped the floor. She was sixteen years of age, and pretty with a soft, warm, broad-browed prettiness. She sang, she mopped, she minded the _patronne_’s baby, who on its unformed legs wobbled about in an extraordinary wooden contraption on wheels.

* * * * *

A few mornings later the _patronne_ knocked at Marya’s door to say:

‘A lady to see you, Madame. She’s in the garden.’

‘Good morning,’ said Miss Nicolson with an efficient smile. ‘Lois asked me to look you up.’

Marya greeted her, then threw a desperate glance backwards into the hotel with a wild idea of escaping this reincarnation of her torment.

Miss Nicolson stood sturdily in the sun, long-bodied, short-legged, neat, full of common sense, grit, pep and all the rest. She was dressed in grey; she wore a green scarf and a becoming hat. Her small feet were shod with crocodile-skin shoes. It was oddly shocking to catch glimpses of very hairy legs through her thin silk stockings.

‘I’m staying at Antibes,’ said Miss Nicolson. ‘I had Lois’s letter about you this morning.’

Her eyes travelled rapidly upwards and downwards gathering information, searching hopefully for the inevitable weak point. Marya muttered an invitation to luncheon and the other looked doubtfully into the dark dining-room of the hotel.

‘We can go to the zoo,’ suggested Marya, ‘it’s quite close by. Some Russian people have a restaurant there.’

As they walked down the sunny road, Miss Nicolson chattered gaily about Lois Heidler, about Heidler, (‘Dreadful man!’ said Miss Nicolson), about Lois’s extraordinary affection for Marya.

They lunched in the sun on heavy Russian food. It was very hot. There was a pungent smell of animals in the air.

Miss Nicolson still discoursed, gradually approaching her climax: Montparnasse, her darling Lois, the husband of her darling Lois, men in general, men who get sick of their mistresses and send them away into the country to get rid of them.

Marya listened with a curiously helpless feeling. It was as if bandages were being torn from an unhealed wound.

‘Lois thought, when she read your last letter to them, that you must be seedy.’

‘To them?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Nicolson innocently, but with a shrewd sidelong look. ‘You did write to them saying you were ill or something, didn’t you?’ She added after a pause: ‘Lois told me to tell you that H. J.’s very busy just now, but that she’ll see that he answers your letter in a day or two.’

Marya paid for the meal in silence with the last hundred francs in her purse.

Miss Nicolson, looking away into the blue distance, remarked: ‘Women are pitiful, I do think.’ Then, because she was light of touch and by no means hard-hearted, she stopped talking about Montparnasse. She said that she despised women from the Southern states because they weren’t efficient. She said that her mother had divorced her father and that ‘all we children sympathized with mother, all of us.’ Father, it seemed, was from South Carolina and shiftless. She said that that marvellous blue made her feel peaceful, that she adored Beauty, that she lived for Beauty.

Marya looked at her curiously. It was strange to think that Miss Nicolson adored beauty and yearned and all the rest. Because she looked such a tightly packed, shrewd-eyed little person. But obviously she did yearn, for here she was saying so.

‘I don’t leap to it any more, though,’ said Miss Nicolson sadly. ‘I used to leap to beauty, but not now.’

‘Let’s go and look at the animals,’ suggested Marya.

There was a young fox in a cage at the end of the zoo--a cage perhaps three yards long. Up and down it ran, up and down, and Marya imagined that each time it turned it did so with a certain hopefulness, as if it thought that escape was possible. Then, of course, there were the bars. It would strike its nose, turn and run again. Up and down, up and down, ceaselessly. A horrible sight, really.

‘Sweet thing,’ said Miss Nicolson.

* * * * *

‘You know, one sometimes takes great dislikes to people who aren’t at all what one imagines they are,’ said Miss Nicolson. ‘People often aren’t, are they?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Marya. ‘I mean, no, they aren’t. Will you come back to the hotel for some coffee? They’ll know the trains to Antibes. Or there’s a ’bus from Cagnes every half-hour.’

She was thinking: ‘I must get drunk tonight. I must get so drunk that I can’t walk, so drunk that I can’t see.’

* * * * *

Miss Nicolson decided on a train about six.

‘Good-bye,’ she said, as she leapt lightly up the high carriage-step with her scarf fluttering bravely behind her. ‘Will you come and lunch with me at Antibes next week--say Tuesday?’

‘Yes,’ said Marya. ‘Of course. Good-bye.’

* * * * *

After the fifth Pernod drunk at the little café on the beach Marya thought: ‘It’s as if I were drinking water. Never mind.’

At the hotel she made a pretence of dining, then went up to her room and took several cachets of veronal. As soon as she lay down she slept. It was still light.

At about two o’clock in the morning she awoke moaning. She lay very still for a moment, then sat up in bed with tightly pressed lips. Every muscle in her body was taut.

‘Hold on! Don’t be a fool,’ she said to herself.

She lay back and shut her eyes and saw Heidler kneeling down to pray in the little church and looking sideways at her to see if she were impressed. He got up and walked out of the church into the room. ‘God’s a pal of mine,’ he said. ‘He probably looks rather like me, with cold eyes and fattish hands. I’m in His image or He’s in mine. It’s all one. I prayed to Him to get you and I got you. Shall I give you a letter of introduction? Yes, I might do that if you remind me. No trouble at all. Now then, don’t be hysterical. Besides, Lois was there first. Lois is a good woman and you are a bad one; it’s quite simple. These things are. That’s what is meant by having principles. Nobody owes a fair deal to a prostitute. It isn’t done. My dear girl, what would become of things if it were? Come, come to think it over. Intact or not intact, that’s the first question. An income or not an income, that’s the second.’

Then she found herself thinking with lucidity: ‘He gave her my letter to read, of course. It’s like being stripped and laughed at.’

She put the light on and looked at the red marks on her arm, where her teeth had nearly met. ‘And I haven’t got a dress with long sleeves, either.’

She worried about that for a while, then got up and arranged the bedclothes carefully. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat. She took a fresh one from the cupboard and lay down again with relief. The room had swayed with her when she stood up.

The croaking of frogs came in through the open window and, very faintly, the sound of the sea. Then it was not the sound of the sea, but of trees in a gale. Dark trees growing close together with thick creepers which hung down from the branches like snakes. Virgin forest. Intact. Never been touched.

She sighed because the pillow was so hot, moved uneasily and opened her eyes. She thought: ‘What a row the sea is making tonight.’ But there was a noise in her head, too, a roaring noise, and the bed kept sinking under her in a sickening fashion. ‘I’ve doped myself properly,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps if I leaned out of the window.’ But she was too giddy to get up. She was too giddy to keep her eyes open. She shut them and again the bed plunged downwards with her--sickeningly--into blackness.

She was trying to climb out of the blackness up an interminable ladder. She was very small, as small as a fly, yet so heavy, so weighted down that it was impossible to hoist herself to the next rung. The weight on her was terrible, the vastness of space round her was terrible. She was going to fall. She was falling. The breath left her body.

* * * * *

‘Yes I heard you being sick this morning, Madame,’ said Madame Moreau with an inquisitive look.

‘I’ll just stay in bed today,’ explained Marya, ‘and then I’ll be all right tomorrow. I was--’ She stopped, because she realized in time that if she said, ‘I was drunk,’ Madame Moreau would be disgusted and shocked to the core. ‘I had an awful headache yesterday,’ she said. ‘I still have.’

‘You look ill,’ said the _patronne_.

A couple of hours afterwards she came back, had another look at Marya and then remarked: ‘If I telephone to Nice for a doctor?’ She went away to do it.

The doctor was small and brown and he asked a great many questions in a staccato voice. Then he tapped and pinched and probed with hands that hurt rather.

‘I want,’ said Marya, ‘something to make me sleep. Something rather strong, please. I’ve been taking veronal, but it makes me sick.’

‘Ah?’ said the doctor. He wrote out two prescriptions, told her to wear a hat in the sun and went away looking wise.

* * * * *

In two days Heidler replied:

_Dear Mado_,

_I’ve had your letter. I cannot for many reasons send you a large sum
of money. I certainly do not intend to help you to join your husband
and I do not consider that you are well enough to get back to Paris
yet. I’m glad Miss Nicolson came to see you. Lois thought she might
cheer you up. Here is a cheque for three hundred francs for your
hotel this week. Do try to get well._

_Yours, H._

She read this letter indifferently. Nothing mattered just then. It was extraordinary that anything had ever mattered at all. Extraordinary and unbelievable that anything had ever mattered.

The days were hot and very lovely. Loveliest in the morning, because then there were grey and silver in the blue dream and cool shadows on the water that was so hot and sticky at midday. Rather like bathing in warmish oil. But sticky or not, it was a caressing sea. If you had any guts; if you were anything else but a tired-out coward, you’d swim out into the blue and never come back. A good way to finish if you’d made a mess of your life.

When she had bathed she would lie and think of little things, stupid things like a yellow dress that Stephan had bought her once at Ostend. He always chose beautiful clothes. He had a flair for that sort of thing. It had been fun to wear beautiful clothes and to feel fresh and young and like a flower. The greatest fun in the world.

One day, quite suddenly, the weather changed and that morning she had a letter from Stephan to say that he was coming back to Paris.

_I can’t get any work here_, he wrote, _I won’t tell you how I’ve
been existing for I don’t want to depress you, but I’ve made up my
mind that to get right away is my only chance, and I’m going to try
for the Argentine. But I want to see you again before I go and
that’s why I’m coming to Paris. Don’t be afraid; there is no risk. I
know a man with whom I can stay quite safely and as long as nobody
actually denounces me to the police, I am all right. I’ve managed to
borrow eight hundred francs. I am sending four hundred to help you to
pay your journey. Come as quickly as you can. I’ll let you know an
address to wire to._

_Stephan._

She meditated over this letter, seated in the dark dining-room of the Hôtel des Palmiers. The grey sky and the cold were a relief and the mistral galvanized her into some sort of activity. She sat with her chin on her hand, a glass of black coffee before her, and felt a faint stirring of hope.