Chapter THREE

‘Good evening, Madame Zelli,’ said the _patronne_ of the Hôtel de l’Univers. ‘Will you come in here for a moment? I have something to say to you. Edouard, give the lady a chair.’

There was a small sitting-room behind the hotel bureau where Madame Hautchamp and her husband spent more than half their lives, quite happily so far as one could see. It was a dim, airless place crammed with furniture: a large table, a small table, three straight-backed chairs.

Monsieur Hautchamp, a hairy little man with vague and kindly eyes, muttered something and withdrew.

‘Of course,’ decided Marya, ‘they are going to raise the rent.’ She waited.

Madame Hautchamp, who was a large, aquiline lady with a detached and inscrutable expression, announced:

‘Your husband will not return tonight, Madame.’

‘Oh!’ said Marya. ‘Ah! _Bon!_ Did he telephone?’

She looked at a loudly-ticking clock on the mantelshelf. It was just eight.

‘Monsieur,’ said the _patronne_, ‘has been arrested. Yes, Madame arrested. About an hour ago, about seven o’clock. An inspector and an agent came here. _Enfin_....’

She gesticulated with both hands and one eyebrow.

‘I understand nothing of all this, nothing. Unhappily, there is no doubt at all that he has been arrested.’

Silence.

Then Marya asked in a careful voice: ‘He didn’t--say anything before he went?’

‘Monsieur asked, I think, if he could leave a letter for you, and the inspector refused.’

‘Oh, did he?’ said Marya, staring at Madame Hautchamp.

Her heart had stopped; then began to beat so violently that she felt sick. Her hands were damp and cold. Something in her brain was shrieking triumphantly: ‘There you are! I knew it! I told you so!’

The _patronne_ remarked, after another pause: ‘These things are disagreeable, very disagreeable for everybody. Nobody likes to be mixed up with these things.’

The inflection of her voice aroused in Marya some useful instinct of self-defence, and she was able to say that it was evidently a mistake.

‘Oh, evidently,’ agreed Madame Hautchamp politely. She looked at her client with curiosity and added: ‘Well, don’t torment yourself too much. The police! Why, the police arrest people for nothing at all! It’s perfectly ridiculous. They have some idea--I don’t know--they say that there is a bolshevist plot in Paris. They arrest this one, that one. Meanwhile the _voyous_ go free. In your place, I should wait for news without tormenting myself, Madame.’

As Marya climbed the stairs to her room her legs were trembling. She was obliged to hold on to the banisters.

‘I must go and find De Solla,’ she told herself. Her mind clung desperately to the thought of Miss De Solla’s calm, her deep and masculine voice.

* * * * *

It was raining and the lights of the Moulin Rouge shone redly through a mist: Salle de danse, Revue.

The Grelot was illuminated. The Place Blanche, sometimes so innocently sleepy of an afternoon, was getting ready for the night’s work. People hurried along cowering beneath their umbrellas, and the pavements were slippery and glistening, with pools of water here and there, sad little mirrors which the reflections of the lights tinted with a dull point of red. The trees along the Boulevard Clichy stretched ridiculously frail and naked arms to a sky without stars.

Marya emerged from the Métro on to the Place Denfert-Rochereau, thinking: ‘In three minutes I’ll hear somebody talking English. In two minutes, in a minute.’ She ran along the Avenue d’Orléans. But Miss De Solla’s studio was in darkness. She knocked, and a woman put her head out of a door on the other side of the courtyard and said that Mademoiselle had gone to London. Mademoiselle might be away for some weeks, but a letter would be forwarded.

‘Ah, I didn’t know she’d gone,’ said Marya.

She stood staring at the dark windows for a minute, then walked very slowly away. As she turned the corner of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau she saw the Heidlers on the other side of the street. They were walking against the wind, both sheltering under a huge umbrella. A gust of wind flapped Heidler’s mackintosh like a flag, caught the umbrella and blew it sideways. She saw his annoyed face.

She thought: ‘What’s it got to do with them, anyway, and what can they do?’ She went along up the street. People turned and stared at her because she was walking so slowly in the pouring rain.

* * * * *

She spent several hours of the following day in the annexe of the Palais de Justice on the Quai des Orfèvres. Every half-hour she consulted a tall, fat-faced man in a black robe who, she had been told, would be able to tell her why her husband had been arrested.

‘What name?’ the fat-faced man would ask wearily.

When she told him, he would run his finger down a list and say: ‘No information.’

Then a lesser light would enter with a pile of fresh documents, and Marya would go back to her bench and wait. The bench was of an incredible hardness--the room was big and draughty--her back hurt.

On one side of her sat a very respectable lady dressed in black who had brought her _bonne_ with her. The companion was evidently a _bonne_, for she wore the Breton cap and apron, and, in spite of the whiteness of the linen, she looked very dirty. They both looked dirty, and they whispered interminably ssp ... ssp ... ssp.

On the other side sat a young man with new shoes of a bright reddish yellow, his coat and trousers were tight, his hat very small, no overcoat. He seemed gay and carefree, and whistled a little tune as he looked with childish and affectionate pride at his shoes, and then with sympathy at Marya. He asked at last how long she had been there, and when she told him: ‘Oh, they don’t hurry themselves, _ces messieurs_. We’ll take root here in the end,’ he prophesied cheerfully.

Everyone else sat as mournfully still as though they were part of the sombre décor of some incredibly dull play. Sometimes a dapper gentleman with an official air would walk quickly through the outer room and smartly into the inner one and then reappear after an interval looking subdued.

Five o’clock.

‘What name?’ asked the fat-faced man for the sixth time. ‘But I tell you I have no information. No, none. I won’t know today--it’s too late. You’d better go to the Palais de Justice tomorrow morning.’

‘Oh, but I must know now,’ Marya told him. ‘I must know. It’s my husband.’

‘If it’s your husband or your brother, or your father or your uncle, it’s just the same,’ said the fat-faced man. ‘I don’t know.’

He added very indignantly: ‘No! But!’

The warder who had directed her to the office of the fat-faced man asked, as she passed him, if she had the information she wanted. She shook her head and began to cry. Her back hurt. She was too tired to be able to bear a kind voice.

‘_Ah, là, là_,’ said the warder. ‘But it’s probably nothing. Nothing at all. Reckless driving. Three days. Come, come. Nothing to cry about, _ma petite dame_. Courage!’

A colleague asked him what he knew about the matter and he turned to explain:

‘I can’t see a woman cry. When I see a woman cry, I am forced to try to comfort her. _C’est plus fort que moi._’

He began again earnestly: ‘_Ma petite dame_....’

Marya had already walked on.

‘Not that way out,’ said a vague voice.

She faced round, passed under an archway, and was on the peaceful Quai des Orfèvres. She stayed there for a long time watching the trembling reflections of the lights on the Seine. Yellow lights like jewels, like eyes that winked at her. Red lights like splashes of blood on the stealthy water. Necklaces of lights over the dark, slowly moving water.

She stayed there till a passing youth called: ‘Hé, little one. Is it for tonight the suicide?’

Then she hailed a taxi and went back to Montmartre, thinking indifferently as she paid the driver: ‘And I haven’t much money, either. This is a beautiful muddle, I’m in.’

* * * * *

Next day she went to the Palais de Justice.

Shining gates, ascending flights of steps. _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_ in golden letters; _Tribunal de Police_ in black. As it were, a version of heaven and the Judgment.

She was hurrying along corridors and up staircases after a bright little man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who had informed her that he was a journalist and asked if he could be of any service to her. He knew the Palais very well indeed, he said. He would dart at a door, tap on it, ask a rapid question and set off again in the opposite direction, and Marya, hastening after him, began to feel as though she were playing some intricate game of which she did not understand the rules. As they ran he talked about the bolshevist scare. He said that the arrests had become a scandal, that it was time that they were stopped, that they would be stopped.

‘That’s what we are here for, we others, we journalists.’ Every time she thanked him breathlessly, he would answer: ‘I am only too happy to assist a confrère.’

She wondered why he imagined that Stephan was a journalist. ‘Now what have I said to make him think that?’ she worried.

He rapped at a final door. Two gentlemen wearing long black robes, little white collars and full black beards, looked at them with inquiry.

‘The husband of Madame,’ explained Marya’s friend, ‘a Monsieur Stephan Zelli, a confrère,’ he smiled and bowed again, ‘has been arrested. She is naturally anxious, very anxious indeed to know the reason of his arrest.’

Fluent explanations flowed gently and persuasively from him. Clever little man! And he was going to get what he wanted, too, for one of the lawyers got up, looked through a pile of documents and came back with a dossier. He said:

‘Zelli, Stephan. Aha! You wish to know the cause of the arrest? It is an affair of theft, of _escroquerie_.’

The journalist cleared his throat and coughed.

‘_Bon soir, Madame, bon soir_,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’m most happy to have been of service to you.’ He backed towards the door, looking nervous as though he were afraid she would try to keep him with her, drag him by force into her disreputable existence. ‘_Bon soir, bon soir!_’ he kept saying in a bright voice. And vanished.

‘Is it a very serious affair?’ asked Marya.

She thought of all the corridors and staircases which had led her to this dim, musty-smelling room and felt bewildered and giddy.

Both the lawyers laughed heartily and one of them threw his head back to do it, opening his mouth widely and showing a long pink and white tongue and the beginnings of a palate.

‘Theft, Madame,’ he said reproachfully, when he had finished laughing, ‘is always a serious affair.’ He ran hard eyes over her with the look of an expert passing intimate judgments, smiled again and asked her nationality. ‘Polish, also?’

‘No,’ said Marya. She got up.

The less flippant gentleman with the longer beard said that that was all they could tell her.

‘Your husband has been arrested on a charge--several charges--of theft. He is in the Prison de la Santé and you will probably hear from him in a day or two. You can get a permit to see him in the annexe, Quai des Orfèvres.’

‘Thank you,’ said Marya.