Chapter FOUR

A letter from Stephan arrived next morning.

_My dear Mado_,

_I fear that you must be most unquiet. Still I could not write for
the reason that I was not allowed to up till yet. When I came in that
evening I found two men waiting for me and they showed me the warrant
for my arrest. I am accused of selling stolen pictures and other
things. This is ridiculous. However, here I am, and I don’t think
that they will let me go as quickly as all that. Except I can find a
very good lawyer. Everything will depend on my lawyer. Come to see me
on Thursday, the day of the visits, and I will try to explain things.
My dear, I have such a cafard._

_Stephan_

‘It’s a pity all the same,’ thought the watching Madame Hautchamp, who noticed that the young woman was pale and had a troublesome cough. ‘Ah, all these people,’ she thought.

Madame Hautchamp meant all of them. All the strange couples who filled her hotel--internationalists who invariably got into trouble sooner or later. She went back into the sitting-room and remarked as much to Monsieur Hautchamp, who was reading the newspaper, and Monsieur Hautchamp shrugged his shoulders; then, with an expression of profound disapproval, he continued his article which, as it happened, began thus:

‘_Le mélange des races est à la base de l’èvolution humaine vers le type parfait._’

‘I don’t think,’ thought Monsieur Hautchamp--or something to that effect.

* * * * *

Marya folded her letter, which was written in English on cheap, blue-lined paper, put it carefully into her handbag, and walked out into the Place Blanche. She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there--hidden under the more or less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.

You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn’t argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.

* * * * *

That evening she sat for a long while in a small bar drinking coffee and after the third glass composed a letter to England asking for some money. Then: ‘But they haven’t got any to send,’ she thought. ‘I won’t tell them yet anyhow. What’s the use?’

She tore the letter up. She told herself: ‘I’ve got to be sensible. I’ll get out of this all right if I’m sensible. I’ve got to have some guts, as Albert Prance would say.’

Opposite her a pale, long-faced girl sat in front of an untouched drink, watching the door. She was waiting for the gentleman with whom she had spent the preceding night to come along and pay for it, and naturally she was waiting in vain. Her mouth dropped, her eyes were desolate and humble.

* * * * *

Marya went back to her bedroom from the misty streets and shut the door with a feeling of relief as if she had shut out a malignant world. Her bedroom was a refuge. She undressed slowly, thinking: ‘Funny this room is without Stephan.’ Empty it looked and full of shadows. Every now and again she would stop undressing and listen, half expecting to hear him coming along the passage.

When she lay down she put out her hand and touched his pillow gently ... Stephan. He was a bad lot. Possibly. Well, obviously. And what if he were? ‘I don’t care,’ thought Marya. ‘He’s been kind to me. We’ve been friends. We’ve had fun together. I don’t care what he is.’

She turned several times uneasily; then sighed, put on the light and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. Humbug it all was. The rotten things that people did. The mean things they got away with--sailed away with--smirking. Nobody caring a bit. Didn’t she know something about that? Didn’t she, though! But, of course, anything to do with money was swooped on and punished ferociously.

‘Humbug!’ she said aloud.

But as soon as she put the light out the fear was with her again--and now it was like a long street where she walked endlessly. A redly lit street, the houses on either side tall, grey and closely shuttered, the only sound the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs behind her, out of sight.

* * * * *

In the morning she went back to the Quai des Orfèvres and was given a permit to visit the Santé prison. Marya Zelli, aged 28 years, British by birth. Polish by marriage.... And so on, and so on.

* * * * *

The outside wall of the Santé frowns down on the Boulevard Arago. Three hundred blackened yards of it, sombre and hopeless. Also it seemed never-ending and there was no sign of an entrance. Eventually Marya asked a policeman who was pacing up and down outside to direct her, and when he stared, she told him in a low voice that she wished to visit one of the prisoners. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of a side-street and turned his back. Inside the entrance a fat, blond warder with a pear-shaped stomach, who sat overlapping a very small chair, waved her onwards with an austere and majestic gesture. She crossed a courtyard paved with grey cobblestones and ascended a flight of stairs into an entrance hall where a bevy of warders were waiting fussily to take the permits. ‘It’s rather like giving up one’s ticket in a Paris theatre,’ thought Marya.

She went into the _parloir_, which was a huge room full of the buzz of voices. One of the warders opened the door of a small cubicle, and she sat down on a wooden bench and stared steadily through bars that were like bars of an animal’s cage. Her heart began to beat heavily. The buzzing noise deafened and benumbed her. She felt as though an iron band were encircling her head tightly as though she were sinking slowly down into deep water.

Stephan appeared on the other side suddenly, as if he had somehow been shot out of a trap.

‘Hallo, Mado!’

‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘My poor boy, what rotten luck!’

‘I think,’ said Stephan, glancing round nervously, ‘that we are supposed to talk French. Can you hear what I say?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, this hellish noise. One would say that the whole of Paris is in here, Mado, listen, the worst, the very worst is that this has happened when I have no money. You must write to England at once for money. Have you written yet?’

She answered cautiously: ‘Well, I’ve written, but they haven’t much to send, you know. What’s the use of worrying them when they can’t really help? But I’ll be all right,’ she added fretfully; ‘I’ll manage something for myself. Of course, there must be heaps of things I can do, only I’ve got an awful cold and I can’t think properly.’

She felt awkward and ill at ease. It was horrible to see his face peering at her through bars, thin and furtive, scarcely like Stephan at all. She said:

‘Tell me what happened exactly. I would rather know.’

He moved his head from side to side awkwardly.

‘Well, I told you in my letter, didn’t I?’

He doesn’t want to tell me, she thought. And, after all, what does it matter? The iron band round her head was drawn tighter.

He began to talk rapidly, gesticulating, but what he said conveyed nothing at all to her. She had suddenly ceased to be able to understand French. He had become strangely remote.

‘And not a sou on me when I was arrested,’ continued Stephan. ‘That’s the stupid thing. That it should have happened just now.’ He swore softly: ‘_Nom de Dieu!_ It’s you I am worrying about.’

‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ said Marya.

The warder banged the door open. They grimaced smiles at each other.

* * * * *

At the beginning of the next week she sold her dresses. She lay in bed, for her cold had become feverish. The garments were spread over a chair ready for the inspection of Madame Hautchamp, who, sympathetic without for one moment allowing her sympathy to overflow a certain limit of business-like correctness, explained:

‘My sister-in-law is a _teinturière_ and I can make an arrangement with her to hang them for sale in her window, otherwise I could not buy them at all. And, as it is, I can’t offer you very much. This, for instance, this _robe de soirée_....’ She pointed out the gem of the collection: ‘Who would buy it? Nobody. Except a woman _qui fait la noce_. Fortunately, my sister-in-law has several clients _qui font la noce_.’

‘But I don’t see why it must be that sort of woman,’ argued Marya.

‘It’s not a practical dress,’ said Madame Hautchamp calmly; ‘it’s a fantasy, one may say. Therefore, if it is bought at all, it will be bought by that kind of woman. Fortunately, as I have told you, my sister-in-law has several clients....’

Madame Hautchamp was formidable. One heard the wheels of society clanking as she spoke. No mixing. No ill feeling either. All so inevitable that one could only bow the head and submit.

‘I can give you two hundred and fifty francs,’ calculated Madame Hautchamp, looking like a well coiffured eagle with a gift for bargaining.

‘All right,’ said Marya. She shivered, shut her eyes, moved her head uneasily to find a cool place on the pillow.

‘Ah, how stupid I am!’ said the lady, gathering up the dresses. ‘This pneumatique came for you.’

‘Dear Madame Zelli,’ wrote Mrs Heidler. ‘We had your address from Miss De Solla. Would you come to dine with us tomorrow night and go on to a party given by an American friend of ours whom I’m sure you’ll like? Lefranc’s at half-past eight. I do hope you will be able to come.’