Chapter SIX

Ten days later Stephan was tried and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment to be followed by expulsion from France. Marya went to the Santé to see him, feeling exhausted, listless, drained of all capacity for emotion. But as soon as she entered the dark courtyard of the prison her indifference vanished. In the _parloir_ a warder opened the door of a cubicle and signed to her. She waited, breathless, trembling a little.

When Stephan appeared: ‘I’ve been ill,’ she began, ‘or I’d have come to the Palais de Justice for your trial.’

‘But I asked you not to,’ answered Stephan. ‘Didn’t you get my letter? Well ... no luck.’

He was unshaven and collarless. He sat huddled up on the wooden seat, staring at her with sunken, reddened eyes. ‘I’m not going to be able to stand it,’ he said in a small voice--a little boy’s voice. ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

The loud conversations from the neighbouring cubicles were like the buzzing of gigantic insects. Inexorable, bewildering noise.

‘I have such a cafard when I think of you, Mado.’

Marya said: ‘Well, I expect I’ll be all right. The Heidlers.’ She pressed her hands tightly together in her lap. ‘I mustn’t cry, whatever I do,’ she was thinking.

‘Heidlers?’ questioned Stephan vaguely.

‘Mrs Heidler came to see me just after I got your letter and I told her. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you away; but I felt, you know--awful.’

‘Oh, what’s it matter?’ said Stephan. ‘_Je m’en fiche._’ Then he added, curiously: ‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing very much. I think she’s a good sort.’ She stopped, remembering Lois’s voice when she remarked: ‘Of course, something’s got to be done about it, my dear.’ A masterful voice.

‘I’m going to see them tonight,’ she went on. ‘They will probably be able to help me to a job or something. Besides, I can get a little money from England. I’ll be all right.’

They sat in silence for a time, then he told her that he was going to be sent to Fresnes, not to a central prison.

‘Fresnes is quite near Paris. Will you come and see me?’

‘Of course, of course.... Stephan, listen. Don’t worry, my dear. You’ll be free in September, won’t you? It isn’t so long. The time will pass quickly.’ Not very clever that. But her brain wasn’t working properly.

‘Quickly! My God, that’s funny! Quickly!’

He laughed, but she thought that he looked as though he were begging for help, and she felt desperate with the longing to comfort him.

‘I love you,’ she said.

‘_C’est vrai?_’ asked Stephan. ‘Well, perhaps. I’ll see that.’

She repeated: ‘I love you. Don’t be too sad, my dear.’ But hopelessly, for she felt that he was withdrawn from her, enclosed in the circle of his own pain, unreachable.

A warder behind him flung the door open and he jumped up with an alacrity which she thought dreadful, shocking.

‘So long!’ he said in English, smiling his grimace of a smile.

The warder bawled something. He started like a nervous horse and disappeared from her view.

* * * * *

It was a foggy afternoon, with a cold sharpness in the air. Outside, the street lamps were lit. ‘It might be London,’ thought Marya. The Boulevard Arago, like everything else, seemed unreal, fantastic, but also extraordinarily familiar, and she was trying to account for this mysterious impression of familiarity.

She felt cold when she reached the Avenue d’Orléans and walked into a bar for some hot coffee. The place was empty save for a big man who was sitting opposite drinking a demi of dark beer. He stared at Marya steadily and heavily as he drank, and when she took Stephan’s letter out of her bag and re-read it he thought: ‘Doubtless a rendezvous.’

‘My lawyer didn’t know his métier. Instead of defending me he told the court that I knew six languages. A stupid affair at Brussels was referred to. This did me in quite....’

A stupid affair at Brussels. But when she tried to think this out her tired brain would only conjure up disconnected remembrances of Brussels: waiters in white jackets bearing aloft tall, slim glasses of beer, the Paris train clanking into the dark station, the sun on the red-striped umbrellas in the flower market, the green trees of the Avenue Louise.

She sat there, smoking cigarette after cigarette, long after the large man had disappeared. Every time that the door of the café swung open to admit a customer she saw the crimson lights of the tobacco shop opposite and the crimson reflection on the asphalt and she began to picture the endless labyrinth of the Paris streets, glistening hardly, crowded with hurrying people. But now she thought of them without fear, rather with a strange excitement.

‘What’s the use of worrying about things?’ she asked herself. ‘I don’t care. I’m sick of being sad.’

She came out of the café and stood for several minutes looking at the Lion de Belfort fair--the booths, the swings, the crowds of people jostling each other in a white glare of light to the gay, metallic music of the merry-go-rounds.

* * * * *

The Heidlers were waiting at August’s Restaurant on the Boulevard St Michel. At a quarter to nine Heidler said:

‘I hope nothing’s happened to that girl.’

And as Lois was answering that she thought not, she hoped not, Marya entered the restaurant. She was very pale, her eyes were shadowed, her lips hastily and inadequately rouged. She was wearing a black dress under her coat, a sleeveless, shapeless, sack-like garment, and she appeared frail, childish, and extraordinarily shabby.

‘Shall I tell her, H. J.?’ asked Lois.

‘Why not?’ answered Heidler, looking majestic but slightly embarrassed.

‘Don’t look frightened,’ said Lois.

Marya glanced rapidly from one to the other and repeated, ‘Frightened--?’

‘It’s something that you’ll like, or at any rate I hope you will. You know, H. J. and I have been thinking a lot about you. And, my dear, you can’t be left alone like this. I mean, it’s impossible, isn’t it?’

She put out her hand caressingly. Marya thought how odd it was that she could never make up her mind whether she liked or intensely disliked Mrs Heidler’s touch.

Lois went on: ‘Now, look here, we want you to move into the spare room at the studio.’ Because she was nervous her voice was even more authoritative than usual. ‘It’s only a cubby-hole of a place, but you’ll be all right there. And you must say till you’ve made up your mind what you’re going to do. Till you’re better. As long as you like, my dear.’

Silence.

Monsieur August placed a large sole on the table, glanced at Heidler with light blue, very ironical eyes, and departed.

‘Imposing looking chap, August,’ remarked Heidler. He fidgeted. He seemed shy.

Marya said in a low voice: ‘I don’t know how to thank you. It’s so awfully good of you to worry about me....’

Heidler remarked with an air of relief that as it was all decided they needn’t talk about it any more. Marya smiled a difficult smile. She told herself: ‘These people are wonderfully kind, but I certainly don’t want to go and live with them. And so I shan’t go. There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘When can you move?’ asked Heidler. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘But,’ said Marya, ‘I’m afraid I shall be an awful bother.’

‘That’s all right!’ Heidler assured her. His eyes met hers for a second, then he looked quickly away.

‘I’m really afraid,’ she persisted, ‘that it’s quite impossible. You’re wonderfully kind, but I couldn’t dream of bothering you.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Lois. ‘We’d love to have you and it’s all arranged. After dinner you must come round to the studio and we’ll talk things over. H. J.’s got to go over the other side to see somebody.’

Marya agreed with relief. ‘Yes, we’ll talk things over.’ She was silent and subdued for the rest of the meal.

When Lois announced: ‘I shall certainly want to paint you. In that black dress, I think, and short black gloves. Or shall I have short green gloves? What d’you think, H. J.?’ she began to wonder why the idea of living with the Heidlers filled her with such extraordinary dismay. After all, she told herself, it might be fun.

* * * * *

The two women walked along the Boulevard St Michel behind their distorted shadows. They walked in silence, close together, almost touching each other, and as they walked Lois was thinking: ‘She can’t make her mouth up. The poor little devil has got no harm in her and I shouldn’t mind doing her a good turn. She won’t be much trouble.’

* * * * *

They passed the deserted entrance of the Bal Bullier and the coloured lights of the Closerie des Lilas, and crossed the street into the dimness of the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where the tops of the trees vanished, ghostlike, in the mist.

The Heidlers lived on the second floor of a high building half-way up the street. The outer door was shut, and, as they waited, Lois began to talk about the concierge. She told Marya that they had a beast of concierge.

‘At one of my Saturday parties,’ she explained, ‘Swansee Grettle--D’you know her? She’s a fine gel. She sculpts. Well, Swansee complained that one of the men had kicked her on purpose. So Swansee’s man took the other man out on the landing and fought him.’

The door flew open, and Mrs Heidler led the way up the wooden, uncarpeted staircase, still talking.

‘Well, Swansee’s man got a bang on the nose and bled all over the place, and when the concierge saw what she had to mop up next morning she made a dreadful row and has been vile to us ever since. Of course, this place is only a makeshift really till we can find something better. Come in here.’

The studio was a big, high-ceilinged room, sparsely furnished, dimly lit. A doll dressed as an eighteenth-century lady smirked conceitedly on the divan, with satin skirts spread stiffly. There was an elaborate gramophone, several cards were stuck into the looking-glass over the mantelpiece. There was a portrait on the wall above the looking-glass, carefully painted but smug and slightly pretentious, like a coloured photograph. Marya thought: ‘It’s perfectly extraordinary that Heidler should live in a room like this.’

‘I’ll go and get some cigarettes for you,’ Lois told her. ‘Lie down on the divan. You look tired.’

She said when she came back: ‘You don’t want to come and stay with us, do you? Now, why? What’s the fuss about? If you really mean that you’re afraid of being a bother, put that right out of your head. I’m used to it. H. J.’s always rescuing some young genius or the other and installing him in the spare bedroom.... Many’s the one we’ve pulled out of a hole since we’ve been in Montparnesse, I can tell you.’ She added: ‘And they invariably hate us bitterly afterwards. Never mind! Perhaps you’ll be the brilliant exception.’

Marya answered vaguely: ‘Yes, but it’s not a question with me of just tiding over a few days or a few weeks. I really haven’t got any money at all and I do feel I ought to do something about it.’

‘Well,’ said Lois, ‘what will you do?’ She looked at Marya with a dubious but intelligent expression as if to say: ‘Go on. Explain yourself. I’m listening. I’m making an effort to get at your point of view.’

Marya began with difficulty: ‘You see, I’m afraid the trouble with me is that I’m not hard enough. I’m a soft, thin-skinned sort of person and I’ve been frightened to death these last days. I don’t at all mean physically frightened....’ She stopped.

Mrs Heidler still gazed at her with sensible and inquiring brown eyes.

‘I’ve realized, you see, that life is cruel and horrible to unprotected people. I think life is cruel. I think people are cruel.’ All the time she spoke she was thinking: ‘Why should I tell her all this?’ But she felt impelled to go on. ‘I may be completely wrong, of course, but that’s how I feel. Well, I’ve got used to the idea of facing cruelty. One can, you know. The moment comes when even the softest person doesn’t care a damn any more; and that’s a precious moment. One oughtn’t to waste it. You’re wonderfully kind, but if I come to stay with you it’ll only make me soft and timid and I’ll have to start getting hard all over again afterwards. I don’t suppose,’ she added hopelessly, ‘that you understand what I mean a bit.’

Lois argued: ‘I don’t see why you should have to start getting hard all over again afterwards. People aren’t such ogres as all that. People can be quite kind if you don’t rub them up the wrong way.’

‘Can they?’ said Marya.

Lois coughed: ‘That’s all very well, but, getting down to brass tacks, what exactly do you think of doing? I feel a certain responsibility for you. I don’t see why I should. I suppose you’re the sort of person one does feel responsible for. You were on the stage, weren’t you? Well, I hope you’re not thinking of trying for a job as a _femme nue_ in a music-hall. They don’t get paid anything at all, poor dears.’

‘I know they don’t,’ answered Marya. ‘No, I won’t try to be a _femme nue_. I don’t know what I shall do.... I don’t care, and that’s a big advantage, anyway.’

She leaned her head back against the cushions and half shut her eyes. Suddenly she felt horribly tired, giddy with fatigue.

‘Of course,’ Lois remarked in a reflective voice, ‘men ... a man would possibly ... yes, in a way.... But that sort of thing must be done carefully, my girl, or it’s the most ghastly fiasco. I mean, even if you make up your mind that it’s your best way out, you must plan it very carefully, and however carefully you plan it’s often a fiasco, it seems to me.’

‘I don’t think I’d ever plan anything out carefully,’ said Marya, ‘and certainly not that. If I went to the devil it would be because I wanted to, or because it’s a good drug, or because I don’t give a damn for my idiotic body of a woman, anyway. And all the people who yap.’ She spoke very quickly, flushed, then burst into tears. ‘Now I’m a gone coon,’ she thought. ‘I’ve begun to cry and I’ll never stop.’

Lois said: ‘You see how right I was to tell you that you must come and stay with us, that you mustn’t be left alone.’ Her voice trembled. Marya was amazed to see tears in her eyes.... ‘You know,’ Lois added, ‘H. J., I love him so terribly ... and he isn’t always awfully nice to me.’

They sat side by side on the divan and wept together. Marya wondered how she could ever have thought Lois hard. This soft creature, this fellow-woman, hurt and bewildered by life even as she was. ‘She simply is more plucky than I am,’ she thought. ‘She puts a better face on it.’

Lois was saying: ‘When you told me that your husband was in jail--d’you remember?--I felt as if you’d stretched out a hand for help. Well--and I caught hold of your hand. I want to help you. I’ll be awfully disappointed and hurt if you don’t allow me to.’

‘I didn’t mean that, really, really,’ answered Marya shakily.

Lois blew her nose. Then she remarked with earnestness: ‘You mustn’t think that I don’t see the--the angle you look at life from. Because I do. If I were you I’d hate, loathe, detest everybody safe, everybody with money in the bank.’

‘But I wasn’t thinking of money so much,’ interrupted Marya.

‘It’s appalling, perfectly appalling,’ continued the other in a complacent voice, ‘to think of the difference that money makes to a woman’s life. I’ve always said so.’

‘Yes, doesn’t it?’ said Marya.

‘Come up and see your room,’ Lois suggested, and Marya followed her up a narrow staircase to a little room which smelt clean and cold. Striped grey and green curtains hung straightly over the long windows.

‘Now, when do you think you can move?’ said Lois briskly. ‘Better do it as soon as you can, won’t you?’

‘You’re a darling to worry about me,’ answered Marya. ‘A darling.’

But as soon as the cold air touched her face outside she felt sobered and melancholy. She hailed a taxi and climbed into it wearily.

‘_Ah, ma pauvre vieille!_’ she told herself.