Chapter EIGHT

At nine o’clock every morning the _femme de ménage_ tapped at the door of the little room where the grey and green striped curtains hung straightly over long windows, to announce that coffee was ready.

When Marya went down to the studio she would find Lois lying on the divan. Heidler sat in a big armchair near the stove opening his letters, and when the last letter was read he unfolded the _Matin_ and asked for more coffee. Marya always brought the cup and the sugar, for he was very majestic and paternal in a dressing-gown, and it seemed natural that she should wait on him. He would thank her without looking at her and disappear behind the newspaper. He had abruptly become the remote impersonal male of the establishment.

The trio would lunch at Lefranc’s, and as Lois had decided that she wished to begin her portrait of the sleeveless dress and the short black gloves at once, Marya spent long, calm afternoons staring through the windows at the tops of the leafless trees and listening to stories about Montparnasse. Lois wore a flowered overall and stood very straight as she worked, her chest well out, her round, brown eyes travelling rapidly from the sitter to the canvas and back again. The movement of her head was oddly like that of a bird picking up crumbs. She talked volubly. She would often stop painting to talk, and it was evident that she took Montparnasse very seriously indeed. She thought of it as a possible stepping-stone to higher things and she liked explaining, classifying, fitting the inhabitants (that is to say, of course, the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants) into their proper places in the schemes of things. The Beautiful Young Men, the Dazzlers, the Middle Westerners, the Down-and-Outs, the Freaks who never would do anything, the Freaks who just possibly might.

Sometimes she would ask questions, and Marya, longing to assert her point of view, would try to describe the charm of her life with Stephan. The vagabond nights, the fresh mornings, the long sleepy afternoons spent behind drawn curtains.

‘Stephan’s a--a vivid sort of person, you see. What a stupid word! I mean, natural. Natural as an animal. He made me come alive; he taught me everything. I was happy. Sometimes just the way the light fell would make me unutterably happy.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lois would say intelligently. ‘I can quite see how he got hold of you. Quite.’

Lois was extremely intelligent. She held her head up. She looked at people with clear, honest eyes. She expressed well-read opinions about every subject under the sun in a healthy voice, and was so perfectly sure of all she said that it would have been a waste of time to contradict her. And, in spite of all this, or because of it, she gave a definite impression of being insensitive to the point of stupidity--or was it insensitive to the point of cruelty? Which? That was the question. But that, of course, always is the question.

Marya admired her benefactress, but the moment of soft intimacy had come and gone. She felt remote and lonely perched up on the model-stand, listening. Besides, after a time she began to feel that she knew all there was to be known about the various couples of Beautiful Young Men or the charm and chic of Plump Polly. The Beautiful Young Men undulated--they wore jerseys and _bérets basques_; they were spiteful and attractive and talented, and could be little English gentlemen when they liked.

‘And that,’ said Lois, ‘is a very useful quality. In fact--call me a snob if you like--it’s my favourite quality. That and good dancing. And, after all, you’ve got to be careful, haven’t you? There’s no knowing what you mightn’t be let in for. There’s some funny ones round here, I can tell you. Some of H. J.’s discoveries I wouldn’t trust a yard.’

As for Plump Polly, a former Ziegfeld Folly, she, it seemed, had started a riot in the Dôme on the 14th of July.

‘She got up on a bench and sang the Marseillaise. Oh, she was very serious, tears in her eyes and all that. All the Americans were delighted, but the French people thought that she was singing an English parody--well, you know what French people are sometimes. And it was the 14th of July. They broke a lot of glasses and things, and Plump Polly had to be hustled out of the back door by the _patron_.’

Lois also discussed Love, Childbirth (especially childbirth, for the subject fascinated her), Complexes, Paris, Men, Prostitution, and Sensitiveness, which she thought an unmitigated nuisance.

‘Clergymen’s daughters without any money. Long slim fingers and all the rest. What’s the use of it? Those sort of people don’t do any good in the world.’

‘Well, don’t worry,’ answered Marya. ‘They’re getting killed off slowly.’

‘Lois is as hard as nails,’ she would find herself thinking. A sentence she had read somewhere floated fantastically into her mind: ‘“It’s so nice to think that the little thing enjoys it too,” said the lady, watching her cat playing with a mouse.’

* * * * *

Every Thursday Lois gave a party, and Marya felt strangely at a loss during these gatherings where everyone seemed so efficient, so up and doing, so full of That Important Feeling and everything--even sin--was an affair of principle and uplift if you were an American, and of proving conclusively that you belonged to the upper classes, but were nevertheless an anarchist, if you were English. The women were long-necked and very intelligent and they would get into corners and say simple, truthful things about each other. Sometimes they were both intelligent and wealthy and would come to Montparnasse seeking cheap but effective protégés.

‘Does that nice-looking young man write? Because if he does I might be able to help him. You know my Ting-a-Ling, Lois? Sweet thing! Well, the little woman who used to look after Ting-a-Ling writes. She writes poems, I got something of hers into our club magazine. Oh, well, then she got very careless and absent-minded and I found a flea on Ting. So I sent her off.’

Marya liked the parties best when, about midnight, everybody was a little drunk. She would watch Heidler, who could not dance, walking masterfully up and down the room to the strains of ‘If you knew Susie as I know Susie’ played on the gramophone, and wonder almost resentfully why his eyes were always so vague when he looked at her. His sidelong, cautious glances slid over her as it were.

‘He looks very German,’ she decided. But when they danced together she felt a definite sensation of warmth and pleasure.

* * * * *

Every Saturday Marya went to Fresnes and waited in the queue of poor and patient people till she saw Stephan, who, craning forward, would talk to her in a voice that seemed to be growing rusty. She thought of him jumping about to the orders of the fat red warder and felt repugnance, a pity which seemed as if it would break her heart, a dreadful, cold loneliness. She would go back to the studio and sit very silent with haunted eyes.

‘D’you intend to go on doing this?’ asked Lois one day.

Marya told her that she did.

‘Well,’ remarked Lois, ‘I don’t approve. The whole atmosphere of a place like that is awfully bad for you. Prisons....’

‘Please,’ said Marya, ‘don’t talk about it.’

She felt that it would be really unbearable to hear Lois talking common sense about prison and the punished in her young man’s voice. Lois said that she intended to talk about it.

‘Because I do feel so strongly--we both feel so strongly--that your only chance is to put the whole thing behind you and start again.’

‘Start what?’ asked Marya.

‘You’re a very tiresome child,’ answered Lois. ‘Very. You know that I’m pulling every string I can, and so’s H. J. We’re certain to fix you up. For instance, I’m almost sure I could get you a mannequin job in about a month or six weeks at What’s-his-name in the Rue Royale. You’ll be all right,’ she continued. ‘You’ll row your little boat along. You’ve got your own little charm, and so on.’

Marya looked up suddenly. There was something very like a menace in her long eyes....

‘Your own little charm and so on,’ repeated Lois. ‘But if you try to help your husband, you’re done.’

Marya got up and walked to the window. She was crying, and Lois watched her with a puzzled expression, strangely without pity. She said:

‘Lots of gels make extraordinary marriages, for all sorts of reasons. When a gel is really lonely and hasn’t got a bean it’s no use asking why she does things. But the time comes when, if you want to save yourself, you must cut loose. Can’t you see that?’

‘No, I can’t,’ said Marya. She repeated with violence: ‘I can’t. I don’t think about things in that way.’ Words that she longed to shout, to scream, crowded into her mind: ‘You talk and you talk and you don’t understand. Not anything. It’s all false, all second-hand. You say what you’ve read and what other people tell you. You think you’re very brave and sensible, but one flick of pain to yourself and you’d crumple up.’

She muttered: ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Lois, ‘let’s talk about something else. Will you make me up for the Russian ball at the Bullier tomorrow? I’m going to wear a purple wig.... You know I hate myself made up. I don’t think it’s my genre, as they say here. But H. J. likes it. And I always give way to H. J. I give him what he wants until his mood changes. I found out long ago that that was the only way to manage him.’ She suddenly looked complacent, smug, and very female and added: ‘H. J.’s an autocrat, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, is he?’ said Marya vaguely. ‘Yes, he is, I think.’ She thought with horror: ‘I do hope she isn’t going to start talking about love and the pangs of childbirth.’

But Lois said: ‘D’you mind going to the coiffeur’s shop tomorrow to fetch the wig? I want to be quite sure to have it in time. It’s a place in the Rue St Honoré.’

Marya answered that of course she would go.

She dined that night by herself in a little crêmerie in the Rue St Jacques. After the meal, which she paid for with her last carefully hoarded hundred franc note, she walked very quickly along the winding street, between two rows of gas-lamps, past the low doors of little buvettes, where a gramophone played gaily and workmen in caps stood drinking at the counters. It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.

There was a smell of spring in the air. She felt unhappy, excited, strangely expectant. She tried--and failed--to imagine herself as a mannequin and she thought a great deal with deliberate gratitude about Lois. Lois in her most charming aspect, lying on the divan in the morning pouring out coffee, soft and lazy in a fragile dressing-gown, her beautiful strong arms bare to the shoulder. The next night she waited eagerly on Lois dressing for the dance and spent half an hour carefully making her up. Ochre powder, a little rouge, the tips of the ears, just under the eyes. Huge, sombre eyes and a red mouth--that’s what she was getting at. Lois sat before the mirror in the studio. The light was so much better there.

‘You ought always to do it,’ said Heidler, looking at his wife with interest.

‘Do you think so?’ answered Lois. She pulled on the purple wig carefully. Her reddened mouth looked extraordinarily hard, Marya thought. When she was following Lois into the bedroom: ‘No, sit down for a minute,’ Heidler said. ‘What a fidget you are!’

He wore spectacles. She thought that he looked kinder, older, less German.

‘Don’t rush off,’ he said. And then, ‘Oh, God, I am so utterly sick of myself sometimes. D’you ever get sick of yourself? No, not yet, of course. Wait a bit, you will one of these days.’

‘No,’ answered Marya reflectively. ‘I’m not sick of myself. I’m rather sick of my sort of life.’

‘Well, I’m sick of myself,’ Heidler said gloomily. ‘And yet it goes on. One knows that the whole damn thing’s idiotic, futile, not even pleasant, but one goes on. One’s caught in a sort of trap, I suppose.’

He stared at the ground between his big knees.