‘I’ve got a room for you in a hotel near the Gare du Nord,’ said
Stephan. He took her arm protectingly. ‘You’re awfully tired, aren’t
you? Stay here for a moment; give me the _fiche_ of your baggage.’ It
was a grey morning. The sky was the colour of train smoke. ‘My friend
Jacques Bernadet lives in that quarter,’ he explained in the taxi, ‘in
the Rue Bleue. But I’ll tell you afterwards; you must have breakfast
and a rest first.’
‘Is that where you can hide?’ inquired Marya.
‘Hide, well, hide,’ said Stephan, shrugging. ‘As long as I haven’t to
register, the police won’t bother about me.’
‘D’you think so?’ asked Marya doubtfully.
He was leaning back smoking a cigarette and smiling, his felt hat
at the back of his head. When she looked at him she felt reassured.
Stephan was like that. He was always able to make his doings appear
reasonable. A comforting quality that.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said. ‘You remember that little café just round
the corner, don’t you? We often used to go there.’
The hotel, which was called the Hôtel de Havane, was brand new.
It smelt of paint and there were ladders and pails of whitewash on
the staircase. Marya had often wandered about that part of Paris
with Stephan when they lived in Montmartre, and she remembered the
dingy streets, the vegetable shops kept by sleek-haired women, the
bars haunted by gaily dressed little prostitutes who seemed to be
perpetually making the gesture of opening their bags to powder their
noses. Over the whole of the quarter the sinister and rakish atmosphere
of the Faubourg Montmartre spread like some perfume.
Stephan came in to announce that the bath would be ready in half an
hour, and that the bathroom was at the end of the corridor. He added
that he had not much money left.
‘How much have you got?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Marya; ‘look in my bag.’
‘You have fifty-five francs,’ he told her. ‘Well, we’ll talk about that
afterwards.’
He came towards her with open arms and a mouth that looked greedy.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
(She had said: ‘Heidler! Heidler!’)
‘Nothing,’ she muttered. ‘I’m awfully tired. It was a ghastly journey.
The carriage was packed. I couldn’t lie down at all.’
‘You’ll be able to sleep after we’ve eaten,’ he said.
Then he told her that he had promised to meet his benefactor, Monsieur
Bernadet, and Monsieur Bernadet’s girl, that evening at half-past six.
* * * * *
Monsieur Jacques Bernadet was a plump young man of middle height. His
face was round, smooth and carefully powdered. He had large-pupilled,
long-lashed, blue eyes which he used in a practised and effective
manner, a very small pursed mouth and a high tenor voice.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I am enchanted to meet you.’
‘What a dreadful man!’ thought Marya.
But the girl with him (her name, it seemed, was Mademoiselle Simone
Chardin) was certainly attractive. Astoundingly pretty indeed. She was
young, swarthy, and wore a red dress tightly fitting and long sleeved,
buttoning closely up to the throat. She spoke very little.
‘I’m here,’ her eyes seemed to say, ‘because for the moment I can’t
find anything better to do. But don’t try to mix me up too much in your
affairs.’
The party sat in a very small café in the Rue Lamartine. There was a
bar upstairs and a coal shop in the cellar, an unexpected but usual
combination. Through the open door they could see the Place Cadet and
its kiosk of flowers, the red back of a newspaper stall, and the open
mouth of the Métro station.
Stephan ordered four Pernods.
‘We always come here for apéritifs,’ he explained to Marya, ‘because
the man who owns the place is a good type.’
‘_Très délicat, cet homme là_,’ affirmed Monsieur Bernadet.
He began a long, involved story illustrating the extraordinary delicacy
of the _patron_, a heavily moustached individual who sat behind his
bar with an immovable face, pouring out the drinks at intervals with
a steady hand. The mirror at his back reflected his head, round as a
bullet, covered with a coarse mane of hair, and the multi-coloured row
of bottles. A hatless woman came in, drank a glass of white wine at the
bar counter and inquired after a certain _beau blond_.
‘Tell him from me that I’m still waiting for him,’ she said and drifted
out, laughing.
‘I know a type,’ said Bernadet, gloomily finishing his Pernod, ‘who
makes a fortune every three years in the Argentine, and then he comes
to Paris to spend it, the fool. Let me once be out of this misery and
I wouldn’t be back in a hurry, I tell you! My God, Paris. Paris. Well,
and then? Without money Paris is as rotten as anywhere else and worse.’
‘It’s nice all the same, Paris,’ murmured the girl.
She had taken off her hat. Her hair, which was curly and worn cut to
the neck, fell very beautifully about her face and smelt of some warm
perfume. Her mouth was like a child’s.
‘Paris is the most beautiful place in the world,’ she said seriously.
‘Everybody knows that.’
Monsieur Bernadet chanted with sarcasm:
_Oh!
Que c’est beau,
Mon village-e,
Mon Paris...._
‘_Air connu._’
‘What scent do you use?’ asked Marya suddenly, speaking to Mademoiselle
Chardin. ‘Chypre?’
‘I? L’Heure Bleue of Guerlain.’
‘Guerlain! Listen to that,’ said Bernadet. ‘I ask you.’ He gave a short
laugh like a bark. ‘Guerlain!’
‘You get on my nerves,’ answered the girl with calm dignity.
Stephan suggested more Pernod and, as Mademoiselle Chardin refused,
three more apéritifs were ordered and the two men discussed the
Argentine with gravity.
You could make your way there, it seemed, provided that you turned your
back on the towns. The country was the thing. Ranches. Cattle.
‘But you can’t ride,’ said Mademoiselle Chardin to her friend. ‘You’re
talking about ranches and you’ve never been on the back of a horse in
your life.’
‘One learns that quickly,’ answered Monsieur Bernadet hopefully.
‘Besides, there are other jobs to be had on ranches, aren’t there? They
want cashiers, for instance.’
He spoke without smiling. Marya had a swift vision of Monsieur Bernadet
clad in the becoming costume of a cowboy, escaping with the cash box
of some confiding ranch owner under his arm. Rolling down to Rio as it
were. But it would have to be a very confiding ranch owner indeed, she
thought.
After the third round of apéritifs, Monsieur Bernadet rose and, bowing
politely, remarked that Stephan doubtless wished to conduct his lady to
dine somewhere.
‘The _prix fixe_ place round the corner is not bad,’ he advised. ‘Three
francs fifty, wine included. _A tout à l’heure, mon vieux._’
‘I don’t like that man,’ said Marya at once. ‘Wherever did you get hold
of him?’
Stephan twirled his empty glass in his fingers with a moody expression.
‘I knew him at the Santé. He was my left-hand neighbour, and when we
went out to take exercise in the courtyard I spoke one or two words to
him. Then we telephoned to each other. You don’t know that there is
a telephone system in the prison, naturally. Well, I’d forgotten all
about him, when we met by chance in Rotterdam, and he told me that if
I wanted to come to Paris I could stay at his place quietly without
anyone knowing it. I understand quite well,’ he added with bitterness,
‘that these are not the sort of people you like, but _voilà_. I don’t
think any respectable gentleman would risk lending me his flat, and I
have to take what I can get in the way of friends.’
‘You’re quite wrong,’ answered Marya, ‘about the sort of people I like,
only I wouldn’t trust this particular man very far, if I were you.’
Stephan remarked scornfully: ‘Trust! You’re funny with your trust. No,
of course, I don’t trust him, any more than I trust anybody else. I
make use of him and that’s all. Let’s go and eat.’
After dinner, in the evil-smelling little restaurant, Stephan said
suddenly:
‘You understand, don’t you, that I must get away? I’ve lost my luck. I
care too much. I did my best but it was no good. I’ve lost my luck.’
His mouth drooped at the corners. There was something wolf-like about
his sharpened features. He went on:
‘I can’t any more. You don’t know what it is. I can’t. I’ve cried
myself to sleep like a little boy night after night. Well, and what’s
the use of that? One stays and cries, that’s all. And there’s so much
that I want to forget and so much that I don’t dare to think of. I’m
not myself any more. Life is pressing on me all the time. Constantly.
To doubt everything. My God, it’s horrible, I must get away. If I could
get away, I might be myself again. There’s an emigration bureau at
Genoa. I’m going there.... _Partir. Partir._ To get away,’ he muttered.
She said: ‘Stephan, look here. Don’t leave me. All the way to Paris I
was thinking that I’d tell you this. Don’t leave me, please. Take me
with you. We needn’t go to the Argentine, need we? Because that would
be horribly expensive. But there are lots of other places. It isn’t
impossible if you really want it. Nothing is.’
He told her: ‘You don’t know what it is, _la misère_. Nobody knows what
it is till it’s got them.’
Marya looked away and answered slowly: ‘No. That’s true. Nobody knows
what it is till it’s got them. But suppose that I could borrow some
money. I might be able to.’
He gave her a sidelong look. ‘Bernadet says that he may be able to lend
me some in a week.’
‘Oh, Bernadet,’ said Marya impatiently. ‘I don’t believe a word of
that.’
‘Neither do I,’ confessed Stephan.
Silence.
‘I must be somewhere where I can work,’ he muttered. ‘People talk, but
let them be in my situation and they would see. My God! to go smash, to
go right under for want of a little money.’
She looked at him, and said in a very low voice: ‘I’ll write to ...
I’ll write ... or perhaps there’s a letter for me at the Hôtel du
Bosphore.’
After that they talked again about Monsieur Bernadet. His business, it
seemed, was the enlargement of photographs. Marya said that she didn’t
know that anybody ever wanted their photographs enlarged these days.
‘Well, they don’t,’ said Stephan. ‘Hardly anybody. But that’s supposed
to be his business. Well, shall we go along to see them now?’
* * * * *
The three rooms where Bernadet and Mademoiselle Chardin lived were
on the third floor of a dark and dilapidated house in the Rue Bleue.
Stephan remarked as they went upstairs: ‘The concierge hates Bernadet,
I shall have to be careful of her. She sympathizes with his wife. You
know, Bernadet chased his wife, sent her off.’
‘What? When he met this girl?’ asked Marya innocently.
‘This girl? Oh no, another one; this one is nothing. Bernadet met her
at the Moulin Rouge the other night and she had nowhere to go, nowhere
to sleep. So he asked her to come back with him.’
‘She’s awfully pretty,’ said Marya.
Stephan answered indifferently: ‘Oh, she’s a good girl. My coat was
torn and she mended it very nicely. She’s fed up with Bernadet. But I
mean, I must be careful of the concierge.’
Mademoiselle Chardin opened the door and led the way into a
high-ceilinged room where a great many gigantic photographs--mostly
family groups--stared down from the walls. There was a dusty counter
down the middle of it and piles of cardboard boxes in the corner. It
was crowded with odds and ends of furniture. A place like a bric-à-brac
shop, smelling of dust and of Mademoiselle Chardin’s perfume.