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Title: Christmas Holiday
Author: Maugham, W. Somerset [William Somerset] (1874-1965)
Date of first publication: 1939
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London, Melbourne, and Toronto: Heinemann, 1961
   [reprint of "The Selected Novels of W. Somerset Maugham",
   Vol. III, first published in 1953]
Date first posted: 28 December 2016
Date last updated: 28 December 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1386

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






                           CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY

                         by W. Somerset Maugham






                               CHAPTER I


With a journey before him, Charley Mason's mother was anxious that he
should make a good breakfast, but he was too excited to eat. It was
Christmas Eve and he was going to Paris. They had got through the mass
of work that quarter-day brought with it, and his father, having no need
to go to the office, drove him to Victoria. When they were stopped for
several minutes by a traffic block in Grosvenor Gardens, Charley, afraid
that he would miss the train, went white with anxiety. His father
chuckled.

"You've got the best part of half an hour."

But it was a relief to arrive.

"Well, good-bye, old boy," his father said, "have a good time and don't
get into more mischief than you can help."

The steamer backed into the harbour and the sight of the grey, tall,
dingy houses of Calais filled him with elation. It was a raw day and the
wind blew bitter. He strode along the platform as though he walked on
air. The Golden Arrow, powerful, rich and impressive, which stood there
waiting for him, was no ordinary train, but a symbol of romance. While
the light lasted he looked out of the window and he laughed in his heart
as he recognised the pictures he had seen in galleries: sand dunes, with
patches of grass grey under the leaden sky, cramped villages of poor
persons' houses with slate roofs, and then a broad, sad landscape of
ploughed fields and sparse bare trees; but the day seemed in a hurry to
be gone from the cheerless scene and in a short while, when he looked
out, he could see only his own reflection and behind it the polished
mahogany of the Pullman. He wished he had come by air. That was what
he'd wanted to do, but his mother had put her foot down; she'd persuaded
his father that in the middle of winter it was a silly risk to take, and
his father, usually so reasonable, had made it a condition of his going
on the jaunt that he should take the train.

Of course Charley had been to Paris before, half a dozen times at least,
but this was the first time that he had ever gone alone. It was a
special treat that his father was giving him for a special reason: he
had completed a year's work in his father's office and had passed the
necessary examinations to enable him to follow usefully his chosen
calling. For as long as Charley could remember, his father and mother,
his sister Patsy and he had spent Christmas at Godalming with their
cousins the Terry-Masons; and to explain why Leslie Mason, after talking
over the matter with his wife, had one evening, a smile on his kindly
face, asked his son whether instead of coming with them as usual he
would like to spend a few days in Paris by himself, it is necessary to
go back a little. It is necessary indeed to go back to the middle of the
nineteenth century, when an industrious and intelligent man called
Sibert Mason, who had been head gardener at a grand place in Sussex and
had married the cook, bought with his savings and hers a few acres north
of London and set up as a market gardener. Though he was then forty and
his wife not far from it they had eight children. He prospered, and with
the money he made bought little bits of land in what was still open
country. The city expanded and his market garden acquired value as a
building site; with money borrowed from the bank he put up a row of
villas and in a short while let them all on lease. It would be tedious
to go into the details of his progress, and it is enough to say that
when he died, at the age of eighty-four, the few acres he had bought to
grow vegetables for Covent Garden, and the properties he had continued
to acquire whenever opportunity presented, were covered with bricks and
mortar. Sibert Mason took care that his children should receive the
education that had been denied him. They moved up in the social scale.
He made the Mason Estate, as he had somewhat grandly named it, into a
private company and at his death each child received a certain number of
shares as an inheritance. The Mason Estate was well managed and though
it could not compare in importance with the Westminster or the Portman
Estate, for its situation was modest and it had long ceased to have any
value as a residential quarter, shops, warehouses, factories, slums,
long rows of dingy houses in two storeys, made it sufficiently
profitable to enable its proprietors, through no merit and little
exertion of their own, to live like the gentlemen and ladies they were
now become. Indeed, the head of the family, the only surviving child of
old Sibert's eldest son, a brother having been killed in the war and a
sister by a fall in the hunting-field, was a very rich man. He was a
Member of Parliament and at the time of King George the Fifth's Jubilee
had been created a baronet. He had tacked his wife's name on to his own
and was now known as Sir Wilfred Terry-Mason. The family had hopes that
his staunch allegiance to the Tory Party and the fact that he had a safe
seat would result in his being raised to the peerage.

Leslie Mason, youngest of Sibert's many grandchildren, had been sent to
a public school and to Cambridge. His share in the Estate brought him in
two thousand pounds a year, but to this was added another thousand which
he received as secretary of the company. Once a year there was a meeting
attended by such members of the family as were in England, for of the
third generation some were serving their country in distant parts of the
Empire and some were gentlemen of leisure who were often abroad, and,
with Sir Wilfred in the chair, he presented the highly satisfactory
statement which the chartered accountants had prepared.

Leslie Mason was a man of varied interests. At this time he was in the
early fifties, tall, with a good figure and, with his blue eyes, fine
grey hair worn rather long, and high colour, of an agreeable aspect. He
looked more like a soldier or a colonial governor home on leave than a
house agent and you would never have guessed that his grandfather was a
gardener and his grandmother a cook. He was a good golfer, for which
pastime he had ample leisure, and a good shot. But Leslie Mason was more
than a sportsman; he was keenly interested in the arts. The rest of the
family had no such foibles and they looked upon Leslie's predilections
with an amused tolerance, but when, for some reason or other, one of
them wanted to buy a piece of furniture or a picture, his advice was
sought and taken. It was natural enough that he should know what he was
talking about, for he had married a painter's daughter. John Peron, his
wife's father, was a member of the Royal Academy and for a long time,
between the 'eighties and the end of the century, had made a good income
by painting pictures of young women in eighteenth-century costume
dallying with young men similarly dight. He painted them in gardens of
old-world flowers, in leafy bowers and in parlours furnished correctly
with the chairs and tables of the period. But now when his pictures
turned up at Christie's they were sold for thirty shillings or two
pounds. Venetia Mason had inherited quite a number when her father died,
but they had long stood in a box-room, covered with dust, their faces to
the wall; for at this time of day even filial affection could not
persuade her that they were anything but dreadful. The Leslie Masons
were not in the least ashamed of the fact that his grandmother had been
a cook, indeed with their friends they were apt to make a facetious
point of it, but it embarrassed them to speak of John Peron. Some of the
Mason relations still had on their walls examples of his work; they were
a mortification to Venetia.

"I see you've still got Father's picture there," she said. "Don't you
think it dates rather? Why don't you put it in one of the spare rooms?"

"My father-in-law was a very charming old man," said Leslie, "with
beautiful manners, but I'm afraid he wasn't a very good painter."

"Well, my governor gave a tidy sum for it. It would be absurd to put a
picture that cost three hundred pounds in a spare bedroom, but if you
feel like that about it, I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll sell it you
for a hundred and fifty."

For though in the course of three generations they had become ladies and
gentlemen, the Masons had not lost their business acumen.

The Leslie Masons had gone a long way in artistic appreciation since
their marriage and on the walls of the handsome new house they now
inhabited in Porchester Close were pictures by Wilson Steer and Augustus
John, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. There was an Utrillo and a
Vuillard, both bought while these masters were of moderate price, and
there was a Derain, a Marquet and a Chirico. You could not enter their
house, somewhat sparsely furnished, without knowing at once that they
were in the movement. They seldom missed a private view and when they
went to Paris made a point of going to Rosenberg's and the dealers in
the Rue de Seine to have a look at what there was to be seen; they
really liked pictures and if they did not buy any before the cultured
opinion of the day had agreed on their merits this was due partly to a
modest lack of confidence in their own judgment and partly to a fear
that they might be making a bad bargain. After all, John Peron's
pictures had been praised by the best critics and he had sold them for
several hundred pounds apiece, and now what did they fetch? Two or
three. It made you careful. But it was not only in painting that they
were interested. They loved music; they went to Symphony Concerts
throughout the winter; they had their favourite conductors and allowed
no social engagements to prevent them from attending their performances.
They went to hear the _Ring_ once a year. To listen to music was a
genuine delight to both of them. They had good taste and discrimination.
They were regular first-nighters and they belonged to the societies that
produce plays which are supposed to be above the comprehension of plain
people. They read promptly the books that were talked about. They did
this not only because they liked it, but because they felt it right to
keep abreast of the times. They were honestly interested in art and it
would be unjust even to hint a sneer because their taste lacked boldness
and their appreciation originality. It may be that they were
conventional in their judgments, but their conventionality was that of
the highest culture of their day. They were incapable of making a
discovery, but were quick to appreciate the discoveries of others.
Though left to themselves they might never have seen anything very much
to admire in Czanne, no sooner was it borne in upon them that he was a
great artist than in all sincerity they recognised the fact for
themselves. They took no pride in their taste and there was no trace of
snobbishness in their attitude.

"We're just very ordinary members of the public," said Venetia.

"Those objects of contempt to the artist, the people who know what they
like," added Leslie.

It was a happy accident that they liked Debussy better than Arthur
Sullivan and Virginia Woolf better than John Galsworthy.

This preoccupation with art left them little time for social life; they
sought neither the great nor the distinguished, and their friends were
very nice people who were well-to-do without being rich, and who took a
judicious interest in the things of the mind. They did not much care for
dinner parties and neither gave them often nor went to them more than
civility required; but they were fond of entertaining their friends to
supper on Sunday evenings, when they could drop in dressed any way they
liked and eat kedgeree and sausages and mash. There was good music and
tolerable bridge. The conversation was intelligent. These parties were
as pleasantly unpretentious as the Leslie Masons themselves, and though
all the guests had their own cars and few of them less than five
thousand a year, they flattered themselves that the atmosphere was quite
bohemian.

But Leslie Mason was never happier than when, with no concert or first
night to go to, he could spend the evening in the bosom of his family.
He was fortunate in it. His wife had been pretty and now, a middle-aged
woman, was still comely. She was nearly as tall as he, with blue eyes
and soft brown hair only just streaked with grey. She was inclined to be
stout, but her height enabled her to carry with dignity a corpulence
which a strict attention to diet prevented from becoming uncomfortable.
She had a broad brow, an open countenance and a diffident smile. Though
she got her clothes in Paris, not from one of the fashionable
dressmakers, but from a little woman 'round the corner', she never
succeeded in looking anything but thoroughly English. She naturalised
whatever she wore, and though she occasionally went to the extravagance
of getting a hat at Reboux she had no sooner put it on her head than it
looked as if it had come from the Army and Navy Stores. She always
looked exactly what she was, an honest woman of the middle-class in easy
circumstances. She had loved her husband when she married him and she
loved him still. With the community of interests that existed between
them it was no wonder that they should live in harmony. They had agreed
at the beginning of their married life that she knew more about painting
than he and that he knew more about music than she, so that in these
matters each bowed to the superior judgment of the other. When it came
to Picasso's later work, for instance, Leslie said:

"Well, I don't mind confessing it took me some time before I learnt to
like it, but Venetia never had a moment's doubt; with her flair she
cottoned on to it like a flash of lightning."

And Mrs. Mason admitted that she'd had to listen to Sibelius' Second
three or four times before she really understood what Leslie meant when
he said that in its way it was as good as Beethoven.

"But of course he's got a real understanding of music. Compared with him
I'm almost a low-brow."

Leslie and Venetia Mason were not only fortunate in one another, but
also in their children. They had two, which they thought the perfect
number, since an only child might be spoiled, and three or four meant a
great expense, so that they couldn't have lived as comfortably as they
liked to, nor provided for them in such a way as to assure their future.
They had taken their parental duties seriously. Instead of putting
silly, childish pictures on the nursery walls they had decorated them
with reproductions of pictures by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Marie Laurencin,
so that from their earliest years their children's taste should be
formed, and they had chosen the records for the nursery gramophone with
equal care, with the result that before either of them could ride a
bicycle they were familiar with Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Wagner.
As soon as they were old enough they began to learn to play the piano,
with very good teachers, and Charley especially showed great aptitude.
Both children were ardent concert-goers. They would scramble in to a
Sunday concert, where they followed the music with a score, or wait for
hours to get a seat in the gallery at Covent Garden; for their parents,
thinking that it proved a real enthusiasm if they had to listen to music
in some discomfort, considered it unnecessary to buy expensive seats for
them. The Leslie Masons did not very much care for Old Masters and
seldom went to the National Gallery except when a new purchase was
making a stir in the papers, but it had seemed to them only right to
make their children acquainted with the great paintings of the past, and
as soon as they were old enough took them regularly to the National
Gallery, but they soon realised that if they wanted to give them a treat
they must take them to the Tate, and it was with gratification that they
found that what really excited them was the most modern.

"It makes one think a bit," said Leslie to his wife, a smile of pride
shining in his kindly eyes, "to see two young things like that taking to
Matisse like a duck takes to water."

She gave him a look that was partly amused and partly rueful.

"They think I'm dreadfully old-fashioned because I still like Monet.
They say it's pure chocolate-box."

"Well, we trained their taste. We mustn't grouse if they go ahead and
leave us behind."

Venetia Mason gave a sweet and affectionate laugh.

"Bless their hearts, I don't grudge it them if they think me hopelessly
out of date. I shall go on liking Monet and Manet and Degas whatever
they say."

But it was not only to the artistic education of their offspring that
the Leslie Masons had given thought. They were anxious that there should
be nothing namby-pamby about them and they saw to it that they should
acquire proficiency in games. They both rode well and Charley was not
half a bad shot. Patsy, who was just eighteen, was studying at the Royal
Academy of Music. She was to come out in May and they were giving a ball
for her at Claridge's. Lady Terry-Mason was to present her at Court.
Patsy was so pretty, with her blue eyes and fair hair, with her slim
figure, her attractive smile and her gaiety, she would be snapped up all
too soon. Leslie wanted her to marry a rising young barrister with
political ambitions. For such a one, with the money she'd eventually
inherit from the Mason Estate, with her culture, she'd make an admirable
wife. But that would be the end of the united, cosy and happy family
life which was so enjoyable. There would be no more of those pleasant,
domestic evenings when they dined, the four of them, in the
well-appointed dining-room with its Steer over the Chippendale
sideboard, the table shining with Waterford glass and Georgian silver,
waited on by well-trained maids in neat uniforms; simple English food
perfectly cooked; and after dinner, with its lively talk about art,
literature and the drama, a glass of port, and then a little music in
the drawing-room and a game of bridge. Venetia was afraid it was very
selfish of her, but she couldn't help feeling glad that it would be some
years at least before Charley could afford to marry too.

Charley was born during the war, he was twenty-three now, and when
Leslie had been demobbed and gone down to Godalming to stay with the
head of the family, already a Member of Parliament, but then only a
knight, Sir Wilfred had suggested that he should be put down for Eton.
Leslie would not hear of it. It was not the financial sacrifice he
minded, but he had too much good sense to send his boy to a school where
he would get extravagant tastes and acquire ideas unfitted to the
station in life he would ultimately occupy.

"I went to Rugby myself and I don't believe I can do better than send
him there too."

"I think you're making a mistake, Leslie. I've sent my boys to Eton.
Thank God, I'm not a snob, but I'm not a fool either, and there's no
denying it, it's a social asset."

"I dare say it is, but my position is very different from yours. You're
a very rich man, Wilfred, and if things go well you ought to end up in
the House of Lords. I think it's quite right that you should give your
sons the sort of start that'll enable them to take their proper place in
society, but though officially I'm secretary of the Mason Estate and
that sounds very respectable, when you come down to brass tacks I'm only
a house agent, and I don't want to bring up my son to be a grand
gentleman, I want him to be a house agent after me."

When Leslie spoke thus he was using an innocent diplomacy. By the terms
of old Sibert's will and the accidents that have been already narrated,
Sir Wilfred now possessed three-eighths of the Mason Estate, and it
brought him in an income which was already large, and which, with leases
falling in, the increasing value of the property, and good management,
would certainly grow much larger. He was a clever, energetic man, and
his position and his wealth gave him an influence with the rest of the
family which none of its members questioned, but which it did not
displease him to have acknowledged.

"You don't mean to say you'd be satisfied to let your boy take on your
job?"

"It was good enough for me. Why shouldn't it be good enough for him? One
doesn't know what the world's coming to and it may be that when he's
grown up he'll be damned glad to step into a cushy billet at a thousand
a year. But of course you're the boss."

Sir Wilfred made a gesture that seemed modestly to deprecate this
description of himself.

"I'm a shareholder like the rest of you, but as far as I'm concerned, if
you want it, he shall have it. Of course it's a long time ahead and I
may be dead by then."

"We're a long-lived family and you'll live as long as old Sibert.
Anyhow, there'll be no harm in letting the rest of them know that it's
an understood thing that my boy should have my job when I'm through with
it."

In order to enlarge their children's minds the Leslie Masons spent the
holidays abroad, in winter at places where they ski and in summer at
seaside resorts in the South of France; and once or twice with the same
praiseworthy intention they made excursions to Italy and Holland. When
Charley left school his father decided that before going to Cambridge he
should spend six months at Tours to learn French. But the result of his
sojourn in that agreeable town was unexpected and might very well have
been disastrous, for when he came back he announced that he did not want
to go to Cambridge, but to Paris, and that he wished to be a painter.
His parents were dumbfounded. They loved art, they often said it was the
most important thing in their lives, indeed Leslie, not averse at times
from philosophical reflection, was inclined to think that it was art
only that redeemed human existence from meaninglessness, and he had the
greatest respect for the persons who produced it; but he had never
envisaged the possibility that any member of his family, let alone his
own son, should adopt a career that was uncertain, to some extent
irregular, and in most cases far from lucrative. Nor could Venetia
forget the fate that had befallen her father. It would be unjust to say
that the Leslie Masons were put out because their son had taken their
preoccupation with art more seriously than they intended; their
preoccupation couldn't have been more serious, but it was from the
patron's point of view; though no two people could have been more
bohemian, they did have the Mason Estate behind them, and that, as
anyone could see, must make a difference. Their reaction to Charley's
declaration was quite definite, but they were aware that it would be
difficult to put it in a way that wouldn't make their attitude look a
trifle insincere.

"I can't think what put the idea into his head," said Leslie, talking it
over with his wife.

"Heredity, I suppose. After all, my father was an artist."

"A painter, darling. He was a great gentleman and a wonderful raconteur,
but no one in his senses could call him an artist."

Venetia flushed and Leslie saw that he had hurt her feelings. He
hastened to make up for it.

"If he's inherited a feeling for art it's much more likely to be from my
grandmother. I know old Sibert used to say you didn't know what tripe
and onions were until you tasted hers. When she gave up being a cook to
become a wife of a market gardener a great artist was lost to the
world."

Venetia chuckled and forgave him.

They knew one another too well to have need to discuss their quandary.
Their children loved them and looked up to them; they were agreed that
it would be a thousand pities by a false step to shake Charley's belief
in his parents' wisdom and integrity. The young are intolerant and when
you talk commonsense to them are only too apt to think you an old
humbug.

"I don't think it would be wise to put one's foot down too decidedly,"
said Venetia. "Opposition might only make him obstinate."

"The situation's delicate. I don't deny that for a moment."

What made it more awkward was that Charley had brought back several
canvases from Tours and when he had shown them they had expressed
themselves in terms which it was difficult now to withdraw. They had
praised as fond parents rather than as connoisseurs.

"You might take Charley up to the box-room one morning and let him have
a look at your father's pictures. Don't make a point of it, you know,
but let it seem accidental; and then when I get an opportunity I'll have
a talk with him."

The opportunity came. Leslie was in the sitting-room they had arranged
for the children so that they might have a place of their own. The
reproductions of Gauguin and Van Gogh that had been in their nursery
adorned the walls. Charley was painting a bunch of mixed flowers in a
green vase.

"I think we'd better have those pictures you brought back from France
framed and put up instead of these reproductions. Let's have another
look at them."

There was one of three apples on a blue-and-white plate.

"I think it's damned good," said Leslie. "I've seen hundreds of pictures
of three apples on a blue-and-white plate and it's well up to the
average." He chuckled. "Poor old Czanne, I wonder what he'd say if he
knew how many thousands of times people had painted that picture of
his."

There was another still life which represented a bottle of red wine, a
packet of French tobacco in a blue wrapper, a pair of white gloves, a
folded newspaper and a violin. These objects were resting on a table
covered with a cloth in green and white squares.

"Very good. Very promising."

"D'you really think so, Daddy?"

"I do indeed. It's not very original, you know, it's the sort of picture
that every dealer has a dozen of in his store-room, but you've never had
a lesson in your life and it's a very creditable piece of work. You've
evidently inherited some of your grandfather's talent. You have seen his
pictures, haven't you?"

"I hadn't for years. Mummy wanted to find something in the box-room and
she showed them to me. They're awful."

"I suppose they are. But they weren't thought so in his own day. They
were highly praised and they were bought. Remember that a lot of stuff
that we admire now will be thought just as awful in fifty years' time.
That's the worst of art; there's no room for the second-rate."

"One can't tell what one'll be till one tries."

"Of course not, and if you want to take up painting professionally your
mother and I are the last people who'd stand in your way. You know how
much art means to us."

"There's nothing I want to do in the world more than paint."

"With the share of the Mason Estate that'll come to you eventually
you'll always have enough to live on in a modest way, and there've been
several amateurs who've made quite a nice little reputation for
themselves."

"Oh, but I don't want to be an amateur."

"It's not so easy to be anything else with a thousand to fifteen hundred
a year behind you. I don't mind telling you it'll be a bit of a
disappointment to me. I was keeping this job as secretary to the Estate
warm for you, but I dare say some of the cousins will jump at it. I
should have thought myself it was better to be a competent business man
than a mediocre painter, but that's neither here nor there. The great
thing is that you should be happy and we can only hope that you'll turn
out a better artist than your grandfather."

There was a pause. Leslie looked at his son with kindly eyes.

"There's only one thing I'm going to ask you to do. My grandfather
started life as a gardener and his wife was a cook. I only just remember
him, but I have a notion that he was a pretty rough diamond. They say it
takes three generations to make a gentleman, and at all events I don't
eat peas with a knife. You're a member of the fourth. You may think it's
just snobbishness on my part, but I don't much like the idea of you
sinking in the social scale. I'd like you to go to Cambridge and take
your degree, and after that if you want to go to Paris and study
painting you shall go with my blessing."

That seemed a very generous offer to Charley and he accepted it with
gratitude. He enjoyed himself very much at Cambridge. He did not find
much opportunity to paint, but he got into a set interested in the drama
and in his first year wrote a couple of one-act plays. They were acted
at the A.D.C. and the Leslie Masons went to Cambridge to see them. Then
he made the acquaintance of a don who was a distinguished musician.
Charley played the piano better than most undergraduates, and he and the
don played duets together. He studied harmony and counterpoint. After
consideration he decided that he would rather be a musician than a
painter. His father with great good-humour consented to this, but when
Charley had taken his degree, he carried him off to Norway for a
fortnight's fishing. Two or three days before they were due to return
Venetia Mason received a telegram from Leslie containing the one word
Eureka. Notwithstanding their culture neither of them knew what it
meant, but its significance was perfectly clear to the recipient and
that is the primary use of language. She gave a sigh of relief. In
September Charley went for four months into the firm of accountants
employed by the Mason Estate to learn something of book-keeping and at
the New Year joined his father in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was to reward
the application he had shown during his first year in business that his
father was now sending him, with twenty-five pounds in his pocket, to
have a lark in Paris. And a great lark Charley was determined to have.




                               CHAPTER II


They were nearly there. The attendants were collecting the luggage and
piling it up inside the door so that it could be conveniently handed
down to the porters. Women put a last dab of lipstick on their mouths
and were helped into their furs. Men struggled into their greatcoats and
put on their hats. The propinquity in which these persons had sat for a
few hours, the pleasant warmth of the Pullman, had made a corporate
unity of them, separated as occupants of a coach with its own number
from the occupants of other coaches; but now they fell asunder, and each
one, or each group of two or three, regained the discreet individuality
which for a while had been merged in that of all the others. In the
smoke-laden air, rank with stale tobacco, strong scent, the odour of
human bodies and the frowst of steam-heating, they acquired on a sudden
an air of mystery. Strangers once more, they looked at one another with
preoccupied, unseeing eyes. Each one felt in himself a vague hostility
to his neighbour. Some were already queuing up in the passage so that
they might get out quickly. The heat of the Pullman had coated the
windows with vapour and Charley wiped them a bit clean with his hand to
look out. He could see nothing.

The train ran into the station. Charley gave his bag to a porter and
with long steps walked up the platform; he was expecting his friend
Simon Fenimore to meet him. He was disappointed not to see him at once;
but there was a great mob at the barrier and he supposed that he was
waiting there. He scanned eagerly the eager faces; he passed through;
persons struggled through the crowd to seize a new arrival's hand; women
kissed one another; he could not see his friend. He was so convinced he
must be there that he lingered for a little, but he was intimidated by
his porter's obvious impatience and presently followed him out to the
courtyard. He felt vaguely let down. The porter got him a taxi and
Charley gave the driver the name of the hotel where Simon had taken a
room for him. When the Leslie Masons went to Paris they always stayed at
an hotel in the Rue St. Honor. It was exclusively patronised by English
and Americans, but after twenty years they still cherished the delusion
that it was a discovery of their own, essentially French, and when they
saw American luggage on a landing or went up in the lift with persons
who could be nothing but English, they never ceased to be surprised.

"I wonder how on earth _they_ happen to be here," they said.

For their own part they had always been careful never to speak about it
to their friends; when they had hit upon a little bit of old France they
weren't going to risk its being spoilt. Though the director and the
porter talked English fluently they always spoke to them in their own
halting French, convinced that this was the only language they knew. But
the mere fact that he had so often been to this hotel with his family
was a sufficient reason for Charley not to stay there when he was going
to Paris by himself. He was bent on adventure, and a respectable family
hotel, where, according to his parents, nobody went but the French
provincial nobility, was hardly the right place for the glorious, wild
and romantic experiences with which his imagination for the last month
had been distracting his mind. So he had written to Simon asking him to
get him a room somewhere in the Latin Quarter; he wasn't particular
about sanitary conveniences and didn't mind how grubby it was so long as
it had the right atmosphere; and Simon in due course had written back to
tell him that he had engaged a room at a hotel near the Gare
Montparnasse. It was in a quiet street just off the Rue de Rennes and
conveniently near the Rue Campagne Premire, where he himself lived.

Charley quickly got over his disappointment that Simon had not come to
meet him--he was sure either to be at the hotel or to have telephoned to
say that he would be round immediately--and driving through the crowded
streets that lead from the Gare du Nord to the Seine his spirits rose.
It was wonderful to arrive in Paris by night. A drizzling rain was
falling and it gave the streets an exciting mystery. The shops were
brightly lit. The pavements were multitudinous with umbrellas and the
water dripping on them glistened dimly under the street lamps. Charley
remembered one of Renoir's pictures. Sometimes a gust of wind made women
crouch under their umbrellas and their skirts swirled round their legs.
His taxi drove furiously, to his prudent English idea, and he gasped
whenever with a screeching of brakes it pulled up suddenly to avoid a
collision. The red lights held them up at a crossing and in both
directions a great stream of persons surged over like a panic-stricken
mob flying before a police charge. To Charley's excited gaze they seemed
quite different from an English crowd, more alert, more eager; when by
chance his eyes fell on a girl walking by herself, a sempstress or a
typist going home after the day's work, it delighted him to fancy that
she was hurrying to meet her lover; and when he saw a pair walking
arm-in-arm under an umbrella, a young man with a beard, in a
broad-brimmed hat, and a girl with a fur round her neck, walking as
though it were such bliss to be together they did not mind the rain and
were unconscious of the jostling throng, he thrilled with a poignant and
sympathetic joy. At one corner owing to a block his taxi was side by
side with a handsome limousine. There sat in it a woman in a sable coat,
with painted cheeks and painted lips and a profile of incredible
distinction. She might have been the Duchesse de Guermantes driving back
after a tea party to her house in the Boulevard St. Germain. It was
wonderful to be twenty-three and in Paris on one's own.

"By God, what a time I'm going to have!"

The hotel was grander than he had expected. Its faade, with its
architectural embellishments, suggested the flamboyant taste of the late
Baron Haussmann. He found that a room had been engaged for him, but
Simon had left neither letter nor message. He was taken upstairs not as
he had anticipated by a slovenly boots in a dirty apron, with a sinister
look on his ill-shaven face, but by an affable director who spoke
perfect English and wore a morning coat. The room was furnished with
hygienic severity, and there were two beds in it, but the director
assured him that he would only charge him for the use of one. He showed
Charley with pride the communicating bathroom. Left to himself Charley
looked about him. He had expected a little room with heavy curtains of
dull rep, a wooden bed with a huge eiderdown and an old mahogany
wardrobe with a large mirror; he had expected to find used hairpins on
the dressing-table and in the drawer of the _table de nuit_ half a
lipstick and a broken comb in which a few dyed hairs were still
entangled. That was the idea his romantic fancy had formed of a
student's room in the Latin Quarter. A bathroom! That was the last thing
he had bargained for. This room might have been a room in one of the
cheaper hotels in Switzerland to which he had sometimes been with his
parents. It was clean, threadbare and sordid. Not even Charley's ardent
imagination could invest it with mystery. He unpacked his bag
disconsolately. He had a bath. He thought it rather casual of Simon,
even if he could not be bothered to meet him, not to have left a
message. If he made no sign of life he would have to dine by himself.
His father and mother and Patsy would have got down to Godalming by now;
there was going to be a jolly party, Sir Wilfred's two sons and their
wives and two nieces of Lady Terry-Mason's. There would be music, games
and dancing. He half wished now that he hadn't jumped at his father's
offer to spend the holiday in Paris. It suddenly occurred to him that
Simon had perhaps had to go off somewhere for his paper and in the hurry
of an unexpected departure had forgotten to let him know. His heart
sank.

Simon Fenimore was Charley's oldest friend and indeed it was to spend a
few days with him that he had been so eager to come to Paris. They had
been at a private school together and together at Rugby; they had been
at Cambridge together too, but Simon had left without taking a degree,
at the end of his second year in fact, because he had come to the
conclusion that he was wasting time; and it was Charley's father who had
got him on to the London newspaper for which for the last year he had
been one of the Paris correspondents. Simon was alone in the world. His
father was in the Indian Forest Department and while Simon was still a
young child had divorced his mother for promiscuous adultery. She had
left India, and Simon, by order of the court in his father's custody,
was sent to England and put into a clergyman's family till he was old
enough to go to school. His mother vanished into obscurity. He had no
notion whether she was alive or dead. His father died of cirrhosis of
the liver when Simon was twelve and he had but a vague recollection of a
thin, slightly-built man with a sallow, lined face and a tight-lipped
mouth. He left only just enough money to educate his son. The Leslie
Masons had been touched by the poor boy's loneliness and had made a
point of asking him to spend a good part of his holidays with them. As a
boy he was thin and weedy, with a pale face in which his black eyes
looked enormous, a great quantity of straight dark hair which was always
in need of a brush, and a large, sensual mouth. He was talkative,
forward for his age, a great reader, and clever. He had none of the
diffidence which was in Charley such an engaging trait. Venetia Mason,
though from a sense of duty she tried hard, could not like him. She
could not understand why Charley had taken a fancy to someone who was in
every way so unlike him. She thought Simon pert and conceited. He was
insensible to kindness and took everything that was done for him as a
matter of course. She had a suspicion that he had no very high opinion
either of her or of Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his
usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting, Simon
would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of
his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker. You would have
thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid. Now and then when
they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together,
chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he
would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away,
and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though
he were by himself. It gave you the impression that their conversation
wasn't worth listening to. It wasn't even polite. But Venetia Mason chid
herself.

"Poor lamb, he's never had a chance to learn manners. I _will_ be nice
to him. I _will_ like him."

Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body ("It's
awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his
dinner-jacket are too short for him already"), his curling brown hair,
his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin. Though perhaps he
hadn't Simon's showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his
fingers' ends. But who could tell what he might have become if she had
run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of
enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had
had, like Simon, to fend for himself? Poor Simon! Next day she went out
and bought him half a dozen ties. He seemed pleased.

"I say, that's jolly decent of you. I've never had more than two ties at
one time in my life."

Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture
that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.

"You poor lonely boy," she cried, "it's so dreadful for you to have no
parents."

"Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I dare say I
don't miss much."

He was seventeen when he said this.

It was no good, Venetia simply couldn't like him. He was harsh, cynical
and unscrupulous. It exasperated her to see how much Charley admired
him; Charley thought him brilliant and anticipated a great career for
him. Even Leslie was impressed by the extent of his reading and the
clearness with which even as a boy he expressed himself. At school he
was already an ardent socialist and at Cambridge he became a communist.
Leslie listened to his wild theories with good-humoured tolerance. To
him it was all talk, and talk, he had an instinctive feeling, was just
talk; it didn't touch the essential business of life.

"And if he does become a well-known journalist or gets into the House,
there'll be no harm in having a friend in the enemy's camp."

Leslie's ideas were liberal, so liberal that he didn't mind admitting
the socialists had several notions that no reasonable man could object
to; theoretically he was all in favour of the nationalisation of the
coal-mines, and he didn't see why the state shouldn't run the public
services as well as private companies; but he didn't think they should
go too far. Ground rents, for instance, that was a matter that was
really no concern of the state; and slum property: in a great city you
had to have slums, in point of fact the lower classes preferred them to
model dwelling-houses, not that the Mason Estate hadn't done what it
could in this direction; but you couldn't expect a landlord to let
people live in his houses for nothing, and it was only fair that he
should get a decent return on his capital.

Simon Fenimore had decided that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent
for some years so that he could gain a knowledge of Continental politics
which would enable him when he entered the House of Commons to be an
expert on a subject of which most Labour members were necessarily
ignorant; but when Leslie took him to see the proprietor of the
newspaper who was prepared to give a brilliant young man his chance, he
warned him that the proprietor was a very rich man, and that he could
not expect to create a favourable impression if he delivered himself of
revolutionary sentiments. Simon, however, made a very good impression on
the magnate by the modesty of his demeanour, his air of energy and his
easy conversation.

"He was as good as gold," Leslie told his wife afterwards. "He's got his
head screwed on his shoulders all right, that young fellow. It's what I
always told you, talk doesn't amount to anything really. When it comes
down to getting a job with a living wage attached to it, like every
sensible man he's prepared to put his theories in his pocket."

Venetia agreed with him. It was quite possible, their own experience
proved it, to have a real love for beauty and at the same time to
realise the importance of material things. Look at Lorenzo de' Medici;
he'd been a successful banker and an artist to his finger-tips. She
thought it very good of Leslie to have taken so much trouble to do a
service for someone who was incapable of gratitude. Anyhow the job he
had got him would take Simon to Vienna and thus remove Charley from an
influence which she had always regarded with misgiving. It was that wild
talk of his that had put it into the boy's head that he wanted to be an
artist. It was all very well for Simon, he hadn't a penny in the world
and no connections; but Charley had a snug berth to go into. There were
enough artists in the world. Her consolation had been that Charley had
so much candour of soul and a disposition of such sweetness that no evil
communications could corrupt his good manners.

At this moment Charley was dressing himself and wondering, forlorn, how
he should spend the evening. When he had got his trousers on he rang up
the office of Simon's newspaper, and it was Simon himself who answered.

"Simon."

"Hulloa, have you turned up? Where are you?"

Simon seemed so casual that Charley was taken aback.

"At the hotel."

"Oh, are you? Doing anything to-night?"

"No."

"We'd better dine together, shall we? I'll stroll around and fetch you."

He rang off. Charley was dashed. He had expected Simon to be as eager to
see him as he was to see Simon, but from Simon's words and from his
manner you would have thought that they were casual acquaintances and
that it was a matter of indifference to him if they met or not. Of
course it was two years since they'd seen one another and in that time
Simon might have changed out of all recognition. Charley had a sudden
fear that his visit to Paris was going to be a failure and he awaited
Simon's arrival with a nervousness that annoyed him. But when at last he
walked into the room there was in his appearance at least little
alteration. He was now twenty-three and he was still the lanky fellow,
though only of average height, that he had always been. He was shabbily
dressed in a brown jacket and grey flannel trousers and wore neither hat
nor great-coat. His long face was thinner and paler than ever and his
black eyes seemed larger. They were never still. Hard, shining,
inquisitive, suspicious, they seemed to indicate the quality of the
brain behind. His mouth was large and ironical, and he had small
irregular teeth that somewhat reminded you of one of the smaller beasts
of prey. With his pointed chin and prominent cheek-bones he was not
good-looking, but his expression was so high-strung, there was in it so
strange a disquiet, that you could hardly have passed him in the street
without taking notice of him. At fleeting moments his face had a sort of
tortured beauty, not a beauty of feature but the beauty of a restless,
striving spirit. A disturbing thing about him was that there was no
gaiety in his smile, it was a sardonic grimace, and when he laughed his
face was contorted as though he were suffering from an agony of pain.
His voice was high-pitched; it did not seem to be quite under his
control, and when he grew excited often rose to shrillness.

Charley, restraining his natural impulse to run to the door and wring
his hand with the eager friendliness of his happy nature, received him
coolly. When there was a knock he called "Come in," and went on filing
his nails. Simon did not offer to shake hands. He nodded as though they
had met already in the course of the day.

"Hulloa!" he said. "Room all right?"

"Oh, yes. The hotel's a bit grander than I expected."

"It's convenient and you can bring anyone in you like. I'm starving.
Shall we go along and eat?"

"O.K."

"Let's go to the Coupole."

They sat down opposite one another at a table upstairs and ordered their
dinner. Simon gave Charley an appraising look.

"I see you haven't lost your looks, Charley," he said with his wry
smile.

"Luckily they're not my fortune."

Charley was feeling a trifle shy. The separation had for the moment at
all events destroyed the old intimacy there had so long been between
them. Charley was a good listener, he had indeed been trained to be so
from early childhood, and he was never unwilling to sit silent while
Simon poured out his ideas with eloquent confusion. Charley had always
disinterestedly admired him; he was convinced he was a genius, so that
it seemed quite natural to play second fiddle to him. He had an
affection for Simon because he was alone in the world and nobody much
liked him, whereas he himself had a happy home and was in easy
circumstances; and it gave him a sense of comfort that Simon, who cared
for so few people, cared for him. Simon was often bitter and sarcastic,
but with him he could also be strangely gentle. In one of his rare
moments of expansion he had told him that he was the only person in the
world that he gave a damn for. But now Charley felt with malaise that
there was a barrier between them. Simon's restless eyes darted from his
face to his hands, paused for an instant on his new suit and then
glanced rapidly at his collar and tie; he felt that Simon was not
surrendering himself as he had to him alone in the old days, but was
holding back, critical and aloof; he seemed to be taking stock of him as
if he were a stranger and he were making-up his mind what sort of a
person this was. It made Charley uncomfortable and he was sore at heart.

"How d'you like being a business man?" asked Simon.

Charley faintly coloured. After all the talks they had had in the past
he was prepared for Simon to treat him with derision because he had in
the end fallen in with his father's wishes, but he was too honest to
conceal the truth.

"I like it much better than I expected. I find the work very interesting
and it's not hard. I have plenty of time to myself."

"I think you've shown a lot of sense," Simon answered, to his surprise.
"What did you want to be a painter or a pianist for? There's a great
deal too much art in the world. Art's a lot of damned rot anyway."

"Oh, Simon!"

"Are you still taken in by the artistic pretensions of your excellent
parents? You must grow up, Charley. Art! It's an amusing diversion for
the idle rich. Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such
nonsense."

"I should have thought..."

"I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a
beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace
to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to a nobler and fuller
life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won't be your
art, it'll be the art of the people."

"Oh, Lord!"

"The people want dope and it may be that art is the best form in which
we can give it them. But they're not ready for it yet. At present it's
another form they want."

"What is that?"

"Words."

It was extraordinary, the sardonic vigour he put into the monosyllable.
But he smiled, and though his lips grimaced Charley saw in his eyes for
a moment that same look of good-humoured affection that he had been
accustomed to see in them.

"No, my boy," he continued, "you have a good time, go to your office
every day and enjoy yourself. It can't last very long now and you may
just as well get all the fun out of it that you can."

"What d'you mean by that?"

"Never mind. We'll talk about it some other time. Tell me, what have you
come to Paris for?"

"Well, chiefly to see you."

Simon flushed darkly. You would have thought that a word of kindness,
and when Charley spoke you could never doubt that it was from the heart,
horribly embarrassed him.

"And besides that?"

"I want to see some pictures, and if there's anything good in the
theatre I'd like to go. And I want to have a bit of a lark generally."

"I suppose you mean by that that you want to have a woman."

"I don't get much opportunity in London, you know."

"Later on I'll take you to the Srail."

"What's that?"

"You'll see. It's not bad fun."

They began to talk of Simon's experiences in Vienna, but he was reticent
about them.

"It took me some time to find my feet. You see, I'd never been out of
England before. I learnt German. I read a great deal. I thought. I met a
lot of people who interested me."

"And since then, in Paris?"

"I've been doing more or less the same thing; I've been putting my ideas
in order. I'm young. I've got plenty of rime. When I'm through with
Paris I shall go to Rome, Berlin or Moscow. If I can't get a job with
the paper, I shall get some other job; I can always teach English and
earn enough to keep body and soul together. I wasn't born in the purple
and I can do without things. In Vienna, as an exercise in self-denial, I
lived for a month on bread and milk. It wasn't even a hardship. I've
trained myself now to do with one meal a day."

"D'you mean to say this is your first meal to-day?"

"I had a cup of coffee when I got up and a glass of milk at one."

"But what's the object of it? You're adequately paid in your job, aren't
you?"

"I get a living wage. Certainly enough to have three meals a day. Who
can achieve mastery over others unless he first achieves mastery over
himself?"

Charley grinned. He was beginning to feel more at his ease.

"That sounds like a tag out of a dictionary of quotations."

"It may be," Simon replied indifferently. "_Je prends mon bien o je le
trouve._ A proverb distils the wisdom of the ages and only a fool is
scornful of the commonplace. You don't suppose I intend to be a foreign
correspondent for a London paper or a teacher of English all my life.
These are my _Wanderjahre_. I'm going to spend them in acquiring the
education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that
suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge. But it's not
only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that's only an
instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more
important: an unconquerable will. I want to mould myself as the Jesuit
novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order. I think I've
always known myself; there's nothing that teaches you what you are, like
being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your
life with people to whom you mean nothing. But my knowledge was
instinctive. In these two years I've been abroad I've learnt to know
myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid. I know my strength and
my weakness and I'm ready to spend the next five or six years
cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness. I'm going to
take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him.
I've got a good brain. There's no one in the world who can see to the
end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and, believe me, in the
world we live in that's a great force. I can talk. You have to persuade
men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of
mankind is such that they can be swayed by words and, however
mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it
in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending.
Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I'm through I
shall be able to do anything."

Simon took a long draught of the white wine they were drinking and
sitting back in his chair began to laugh. His face writhed into a
grimace of intolerable suffering.

"I must tell you an incident that happened a few months ago here. They
were having a meeting of the British Legion or something like that, I
forget what for, war graves or something; my chief was going to speak,
but he had a cold in the head and he sent me instead. You know what our
paper is, bloody patriotic as long as it helps our circulation, all the
dirt we can get, and a high moral tone. My chief's the right man in the
right place. He hasn't had an idea in his head for twenty years. He
never opens his mouth without saying the obvious and when he tells a
dirty story it's so stale that it doesn't even stink any more. But he's
as shrewd as they make 'em. He knows what the proprietor wants and he
gives it to him. Well, I made the speech he would have made. Platitudes
dripped from my mouth. I made the welkin ring with claptrap. I gave them
jokes so hoary that even a judge would have been ashamed to make them.
They roared with laughter. I gave them pathos so shaming that you would
have thought they would vomit. The tears rolled down their cheeks. I
beat the big drum of patriotism like a Salvation Lass sublimating her
repressed sex. They cheered me to the echo. It was the speech of the
evening. When it was all over the big-wigs wrung my hand still
overwhelmed with emotion. I got them all right. And d'you know, I didn't
say a single word that I didn't know was contemptible balderdash. Words,
words, words! Poor old Hamlet."

"It was a damned unscrupulous thing to do," said Charley. "After all, I
dare say they were just a lot of ordinary, decent fellows who were only
wanting to do what they thought was the right thing, and what's more
they were probably prepared to put their hands in their pockets to prove
the sincerity of their convictions."

"You would think that. In point of fact more money was raised for
whatever the damned cause was than had ever been raised before at one of
their meetings and the organisers told my chief it was entirely due to
my brilliant speech."

Charley in his candour was distressed. This was not the Simon he had
known so long. Formerly, however wild his theories were, however
provocatively expressed, there was a sort of nobility in them. He was
disinterested. His indignation was directed against oppression and
cruelty. Injustice roused him to fury. But Simon did not notice the
effect he had on Charley or if he did was indifferent to it. He was
absorbed in himself.

"But brain isn't enough and eloquence, even if it's necessary, is after
all a despicable gift. Kerensky had them both and what did they avail
him? The important thing is character. It's my character I've got to
mould. I'm sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It's only
a matter of will. I've got to train myself so that I'm indifferent to
insult, neglect and ridicule. I've got to acquire a spiritual aloofness
so complete that if they put me in prison I shall feel myself as free as
a bird in the air. I've got to make myself so strong that when I make
mistakes I am unshaken, but profit by them to act rightly. I've got to
make myself so hard that not only can I resist the temptation to be
pitiful, but I don't even feel pity. I've got to wring out of my heart
the possibility of love."

"Why?"

"I can't afford to let my judgment be clouded by any feeling that I
might have for a human being. You are the only person I've ever cared
for in the world, Charley. I shan't rest till I know in my bones that if
it were necessary to put you against a wall and shoot you with my own
hands I could do it without a moment's hesitation and without a moment's
regret."

Simon's eyes had a dark opaqueness which reminded you of an old mirror,
in a deserted house, from which the quicksilver was worn away, so that
when you looked in it you saw, not yourself, but a sombre depth in which
seemed to lurk the reflections of long-past events and passions long
since dead and yet in some terrifying way tremulous still with a
borrowed and mysterious life.

"Did you wonder why I didn't come to the station to meet you?"

"It would have been nice if you had. I supposed you couldn't get away."

"I knew you'd be disappointed. It's our busy time at the office, we have
to be on tap then to telephone to London the news that's come through in
the course of the day, but it's Christmas Eve, the paper doesn't come
out to-morrow and I could have got away easily. I didn't come because I
wanted to so much. Ever since I got your letter saying you were coming
over I've been sick with the desire to see you. When the train was due
and I knew you'd be wandering up the platform looking for me and rather
lost in that struggling crowd, I took a book and began to read. I sat
there, forcing myself to attend to it, and refusing to let myself listen
for the telephone that I expected every moment to ring. And when it did
and I knew it was you, my joy was so intense that I was enraged with
myself. I almost didn't answer. For more than two years now I've been
striving to rid myself of the feeling I have for you. Shall I tell you
why I wanted you to come over? One idealises people when they're away,
it's true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when one sees
them again one's often surprised that one saw anything in them at all. I
thought that if there were anything left in me of the old feeling I had
for you the few days you're spending here now would be enough to kill
it."

"I'm afraid you'll think me very stupid," said Charley, with his
engaging smile, "but I can't for the life of me see why you want to."

"I do think you're very stupid."

"Well, taking that for granted, what is the reason?"

Simon frowned a little and his restless eyes darted here and there like
a hare trying to escape a pursuer.

"You're the only person who ever cared for me."

"That's not true. My father and mother have always been very fond of
you."

"Don't talk such nonsense. Your father was as indifferent to me as he is
to art, but it gave him a warm, comfortable feeling of benevolence to be
kind to the orphan penniless boy whom he could patronise and impress.
Your mother thought me unscrupulous and self-seeking. She hated the
influence she thought I had over you and she was affronted because she
saw that I thought your father an old humbug, the worst sort of humbug,
the one who humbugs himself; the only satisfaction I ever gave her was
that she couldn't look at me without thinking how nice it was that you
were so very different from me."

"You're not very flattering to my poor parents," said Charley, mildly.

Simon took no notice of the interruption.

"We clicked at once. What that old bore Goethe would have called
elective affinity. You gave me what I'd never had. I, who'd never been a
boy, could be a boy with you. I could forget myself in you. I bullied
you and ragged you and mocked you and neglected you, but all the time I
worshipped you. I felt wonderfully at home with you. With you I could be
just myself. You were so unassuming, so easily pleased, so gay and so
good-natured, merely to be with you rested my tortured nerves and
released me for a moment from that driving force that urged me on and
on. But I don't want rest and I don't want release. My will falters when
I look at your sweet and diffident smile. I can't afford to be soft, I
can't afford to be tender. When I look into those blue eyes of yours, so
friendly, so confiding in human nature, I waver, and I daren't waver.
You're my enemy and I hate you."

Charley had flushed uncomfortably at some of the things that Simon had
said to him, but now he chuckled good-humouredly.

"Oh, Simon, what stuff and nonsense you talk."

Simon paid no attention. He fixed Charley with his glittering,
passionate eyes as though he sought to bore into the depths of his
being.

"Is there anything there?" he said, as though speaking to himself. "Or
is it merely an accident of expression that gives the illusion of some
quality of the soul?" And then to Charley: "I've often asked myself what
it was that I saw in you. It wasn't your good looks, though I dare say
they had something to do with it; it wasn't your intelligence, which is
adequate without being remarkable; it wasn't your guileless nature or
your good temper. What is it in you that makes people take to you at
first sight? You've won half your battle before ever you take the field.
Charm? What is charm? It's one of the words we all know the meaning of,
but we can none of us define. But I know if I had that gift of yours,
with my brain and my determination there's no obstacle in the world I
couldn't surmount. You've got vitality and that's part of charm. But I
have just as much vitality as you; I can do with four hours' sleep for
days on end and I can work for sixteen hours a day without getting
tired. When people first meet me they're antagonistic, I have to conquer
them by sheer brain-power, I have to play on their weaknesses, I have to
make myself useful to them, I have to flatter them. When I came to Paris
my chief thought me the most disagreeable young man and the most
conceited he'd ever met. Of course he's a fool. How can a man be
conceited when he knows his defects as well as I know mine? Now he eats
out of my hand. But I've had to work like a dog to achieve what you can
do with a flicker of your long eyelashes. Charm is essential. In the
last two years I've got to know a good many prominent politicians and
they've all got it. Some more and some less. But they can't all have it
by nature. That shows it can be acquired. It means nothing, but it
arouses the devotion of their followers so that they'll do blindly all
they're bidden and be satisfied with the reward of a kind word. I've
examined them at work. They can turn it on like water from a tap. The
quick, friendly smile; the hand that's so ready to clasp yours. The
warmth in the voice that seems to promise favours, the show of interest
that leads you to think your concerns are your leader's chief
preoccupation, the intimate manner which tells you nothing, but deludes
you into thinking you are in your master's confidence. The clichs, the
hundred varieties of "dear old boy" that are so flattering on
influential lips. The ease and naturalness, the perfect acting that
imitates nature, and the sensitiveness that discerns a fool's vanity and
takes care never to affront it. I can learn all that, it only means a
little more effort and a little more self-control. Sometimes of course
they overdo it, the pros, their charm becomes so mechanical that it
ceases to work; people see through it, and feeling they've been duped
are resentful." He gave Charley another of his piercing glances. "Your
charm is natural, that's why it's so devastating. Isn't it absurd that a
tiny wrinkle should make life so easy for you?"

"What on earth do you mean?"

"One of the reasons why I wanted you to come over was to see exactly in
what your charm consisted. As far as I can tell, it depends on some
peculiar muscular formation of your lower orbit. I believe it to be due
to a little crease under your eyes when you smile."

It embarrassed Charley to be thus anatomised, and to divert the
conversation from himself he asked:

"But all this effort of yours, what is it going to lead you to?"

"Who can tell? Let's go and have our coffee at the Dme."

"All right. I'll get hold of a waiter."

"I'm going to stand you your dinner. It's the first meal that we've had
together that I've ever paid for."

When he took out of his pocket some notes to settle up with he found
with them a couple of cards.

"Oh, look, I've got a ticket for you for the Midnight Mass at St.
Eustache. It's supposed to be the best church music in Paris and I
thought you'd like to go."

"Oh, Simon, how nice of you. I should love to. You'll come with me,
won't you?"

"I'll see how I feel when the time comes. Anyhow take the tickets."

Charley put them in his pocket. They walked to the Dme. The rain had
stopped, but the pavement was still wet and, when the light of a shop
window or a street lamp fell upon it, palely glistened. A lot of people
were wandering to and fro. They came out of the shadow of the leafless
trees as though from the wings of a theatre, passed across the light and
then were lost again in another patch of night. Cringing but persistent,
the Algerian peddlers, their eyes alert for a possible buyer, passed
with a bundle of Eastern rugs and cheap furs over their arms.
Coarse-faced boys, a fez on their heads, carried baskets of monkey-nuts
and monotonously repeated their raucous cry: cacaouettes, cacaouettes!
At a corner stood two negroes, their dark faces pinched with cold, as
though time had stopped and they waited because there was nothing in the
world to do but wait. The two friends reached the Dme. The terrace
where in summer the customers sat in the open was glassed in. Every
table was engaged, but as they came in a couple got up and they took the
empty places. It was none too warm, and Simon wore no coat.

"Won't you be cold?" Charley asked him. "Wouldn't you prefer to sit
inside?"

"No, I've taught myself not to mind cold."

"What happens when you catch one?"

"I ignore it."

Charley had often heard of the Dme, but had never been there, and he
looked with eager curiosity at the people who sat all round them. There
were young men in turtle-neck sweaters, some of them with short beards,
and girls bare-headed, in raincoats; he supposed they were painters and
writers, and it gave him a little thrill to look at them.

"English or American," said Simon, with a scornful shrug of the
shoulders. "Wasters and rotters most of them, pathetically dressing up
for a rle in a play that has long ceased to be acted."

Over there was a group of tall, fair-haired youths who looked like
Scandinavians, and at another table a swarthy, gesticulating, loquacious
band of Levantines. But the greater number were quiet French people,
respectably dressed, shopkeepers from the neighbourhood who came to the
Dme because it was convenient, with a sprinkling of provincials who,
like Charley, still thought it the resort of artists and students.

"Poor brutes, they haven't got the money to lead the Latin Quarter life
any more. They live on the edge of starvation and work like
galley-slaves. I suppose you've read the _Vie de Bohme_? Rodolphe now
wears a neat blue suit that he's bought off the nail and puts his
trousers under his mattress every night to keep them in shape. He counts
every penny he spends and takes care to do nothing to compromise his
future. Mimi and Musette are hard-working girls, trade unionists, who
spend their spare evenings attending party meetings, and even if they
lose their virtue, keep their heads."

"Don't you live with a girl?"

"No."

"Why not? I should have thought it would be very pleasant. In the year
you've been in Paris you must have had plenty of chances of picking
someone up."

"Yes, I've had one or two. Strange when you come to think of it. D'you
know what my place consists of? A studio and a kitchen. No bath. The
concierge is supposed to come and clean up every day, but she has
varicose veins and hates climbing the stairs. That's all I have to offer
and yet there've been three girls who wanted to come and share my
squalor with me. One was English, she's got a job here in the
International Communist Bureau, another was a Norwegian, she's working
at the Sorbonne, and one was French--you'd have thought she had more
sense; she was a dressmaker and out of work. I picked her up one evening
when I was going out to dinner; she told me she hadn't had a meal all
day and I stood her one. It was a Saturday night and she stayed till
Monday. She wanted to stay on, but I told her to get out and she went.
The Norwegian was rather a nuisance. She wanted to darn my socks and
cook for me and scrub the floor. When I told her there was nothing doing
she took to waiting for me at street corners, walking beside me in the
street and telling me that if I didn't relent she'd kill herself. She
taught me a lesson that I've taken to heart. I had to be rather firm
with her in the end."

"What d'you mean by that?"

"Well, one day I told her that I was sick of her pestering. I told her
that next time she addressed me in the street I'd knock her down. She
was rather stupid and she didn't know I meant it. Next day when I came
out of my house--it was about twelve and I was just going to the
office--she was standing on the other side of the street. She came up to
me, with that hang-dog look of hers, and began to speak. I didn't let
her get more than two or three words out, I hit her on the chin and she
went down like a nine-pin."

Simon's eyes twinkled with amusement.

"What happened then?"

"I don't know. I suppose she got up again. I walked on and didn't look
round to see. Anyhow she took the hint and that's the last I saw of
her."

The story made Charley very uncomfortable and at the same time made him
want to laugh. But he was ashamed of this and remained silent.

"The comic one was the English communist. My dear, she was the daughter
of a dean. She'd been to Oxford and she'd taken her degree in economics.
She was terribly genteel, oh, a perfect lady, but she looked upon
promiscuous fornication as a sacred duty. Every time she went to bed
with a comrade she felt she was helping the Cause. We were to be good
pals, fight the good fight together, shoulder to shoulder, and all that
sort of thing. The dean gave her an allowance and we were to pool our
resources, make my studio a Centre, have the comrades in to afternoon
tea and discuss the burning questions of the day. I just told her a few
home truths and that finished her."

He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful
smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him. Charley
had several things to say, but did not know how to put them so that they
should not sound affected and so arouse Simon's irony.

"But is it your wish to cut human relations out of your life
altogether?" he asked, uncertainly.

"Altogether. I've got to be free. I daren't let another person get a
hold over me. That's why I turned out the little sempstress. She was the
most dangerous of the lot. She was gentle and affectionate. She had the
meekness of the poor who have never dreamt that life can be other than
hard. I could never have loved her, but I knew that her gratitude, her
adoration, her desire to please, her innocent cheerfulness, were
dangerous. I could see that she might easily become a habit of which I
couldn't break myself. Nothing in the world is so insidious as a woman's
flattery; our need for it is so enormous that we become her slave. I
must be as impervious to flattery as I am indifferent to abuse. There's
nothing that binds one to a woman like the benefits one confers on her.
She would have owed me everything, that girl; I should never have been
able to escape from her."

"But, Simon, you have human passions like the rest of us. You're
twenty-three."

"And my sexual desires are urgent? Less urgent than you imagine. When
you work from twelve to sixteen hours a day and sleep on an average six,
when you content yourself with one meal a day, much as it may surprise
you, your desires are much attenuated. Paris is singularly well arranged
for the satisfaction of the sexual instinct at moderate expense and with
the least possible waste of time, and when I find that my appetite is
interfering with my work I have a woman just as when I'm constipated I
take a purge."

Charley's clear blue eyes twinkled with amusement and a charming smile
parting his lips displayed his strong white teeth.

"Aren't you missing a lot of fun? You know, one's young for such a
little while."

"I may be. I know one can do nothing in the world unless one's
single-minded. Chesterfield said the last word about sexual congress:
the pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous, and the expense
is damnable. It may be an instinct that one can't suppress, but the
man's a pitiful fool who allows it to divert him from his chosen path.
I'm not afraid of it any more. In a few more years I shall be entirely
free from its temptation."

"Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these
days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men."

Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile look.

"I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten
tooth."

"That's easier said than done."

"I know. Nothing that's worth doing is done easily, but that's one of
the odd things about man: if his self-preservation is concerned, if he
has to do something on which his being depends, he can find in himself
the strength to do it."

Charley was silent. If anyone else had spoken to him as Simon had done
that evening he would have thought it a pose adopted to impress. Charley
had heard during his three years at Cambridge enough extravagant talk to
be able, with his commonsense and quiet humour, to attach no more
importance to it than it deserved. But he knew that Simon never talked
for effect. He was too contemptuous of his fellows' opinion to extort
their admiration by taking up an attitude in which he did not believe.
He was fearless and sincere. When he said that he thought this and that,
you could be certain that he did, and when he said he had done that and
the other you need not hesitate to believe that he had. But just as the
manner of life that Simon had described seemed to Charley morbid and
unnatural, so the ideas he expressed with a fluency that showed they
were well considered seemed to him outrageous and horrible. He noticed
that Simon had avoided saying what was the end for which he was thus so
sternly disciplining himself; but at Cambridge he had been violently
communist and it was natural to suppose that he was training himself to
play his part in the revolution they had then, all of them, anticipated
in the near future. Charley, much more concerned with the arts, had
listened with interest, but without feeling that the matter was any
particular affair of his, to the heated arguments he heard in Simon's
rooms. If he had been obliged to state his views on a subject to which
he had never given much thought, he would have agreed with his father:
whatever might happen on the Continent there was no danger of communism
in England; the hash they'd made in Russia showed it was impracticable;
there always had been rich and poor in the world and there always would
be; the English working man was too shrewd to let himself be led away by
a lot of irresponsible agitators; and after all he didn't have a bad
time.

Simon went on. He was eager to deliver himself of thoughts that he had
bottled up for many months and he had been used to impart them to
Charley for as long as he could remember. Though he reflected upon them
with the intensity which was one of his great gifts, he found that they
gained in clearness and force when he had this perfect listener to put
them to.

"An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is
ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as
though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is
less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a
captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it
than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked
upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity,
buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into
the end and aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity
was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden
heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world
and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And
like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to
it. For two thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills
and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that
almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only
the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay
it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the
platform, the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to
hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria."

"But, Simon, the slave population of the ancient world was just the
proletariat of to-day."

Simon's lips trembled with a smile and the look he fixed on Charley made
him feel that he had said a silly thing.

"I know," said Simon quietly.

For a while his restless eyes were still, but though he looked at
Charley his gaze seemed fixed on something in the far distance. Charley
did not know of what he thought, but he was conscious of a faint
malaise.

"It may be that the habit of two thousand years has made love a human
necessity and in that case it must be taken into account. But if dope
must be administered the best person to do so is surely not a
dope-fiend. If love can be put to some useful purpose it can only be by
someone who is himself immune to it."

"You don't seem to want to tell me what end you expect to attain by
denying yourself everything that makes life pleasant. I wonder if any
end can be worth it."

"What have you been doing with yourself for the last year, Charley?"

The sudden question seemed inconsequent, but he answered it with his
usual modest frankness.

"Nothing very much, I'm afraid. I've been going to the office pretty
well every day; I've spent a certain amount of time on the Estate
getting to know the properties and all that sort of thing; I've played
golf with Father. He likes to get in a round two or three days a week.
And I've kept up with my piano-playing. I've been to a good many
concerts. I've seen most of the picture shows. I've been to the opera a
bit and seen a certain number of plays."

"You've had a thoroughly good time?"

"Not bad. I've enjoyed myself."

"And what d'you expect to do next year?"

"More or less the same, I should think."

"And the year after, and the year after that?"

"I suppose in a few years I shall get married and then my father will
retire and hand over his job to me. It brings in a thousand a year, not
so bad in these days, and of course eventually I shall get my half of my
father's share in the Mason Estate."

"And then you'll lead the sort of life your father has led before you?"

"Unless the Labour Party confiscate the Mason Estate. Then of course I
shall be in the cart. But until then I'm quite prepared to do my little
job and have as much fun as I can on the income I've got."

"And when you die will it have mattered a damn whether you ever lived or
not?"

For a moment the unexpected question disconcerted Charley and he
flushed.

"I don't suppose it will."

"Are you satisfied with that?"

"To tell you the truth, I've never thought about it. But if you ask me
point-blank, I think I should be a fool if I weren't. I could never have
become a great artist. I talked it over with Father that summer after I
came down, when we went fishing in Norway. He put it awfully nicely.
Poor old dear, he was very anxious not to hurt my feelings, but I
couldn't help admitting that what he said was true. I've got a natural
facility for doing things, I can paint a bit and write a bit and play a
bit, perhaps I might have had a chance if I'd only been able to do one
thing; but it was only a facility. Father was quite right when he said
that wasn't enough, and I think he was right too when he said it was
better to be a pretty good business man than a second-rate artist. After
all, it's a bit of luck for me that old Sibert Mason married the cook
and started growing vegetables on a bit of land that the growth of
London turned into a valuable property. Don't you think it's enough if I
do my duty in that state of life in which providence, or chance, if you
like, has placed me?"

Simon gave him a smile more indulgent than any that had tortured his
features that evening.

"I dare say, Charley. But not for me. I would sooner be smashed into a
mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a
life like yours."

Charley looked at him calmly.

"You see, Simon, I have a happy nature and you haven't."

Simon chuckled.

"We must see if we can't change that. Let's stroll along. I'll take you
to the Srail."




                              CHAPTER III


The front door, a discreet door in a house of respectable appearance,
was opened for them by a negro in Turkish dress and as they entered a
narrow ill-lit passage a woman came out of an ante-room. She took them
in with a quick, cool glance, but then, recognising Simon, immediately
assumed an air of geniality. They shook hands warmly.

"This is Mademoiselle Ernestine," he said to Charley, and then to her:
"My friend has arrived from London this evening. He wishes to see life."

"You've brought him to the right place."

She gave Charley an appraising look. Charley saw a woman who might have
been in the later thirties, good-looking in a cold, hard way, with a
straight nose, thin-painted lips and a firm chin; she was neatly dressed
in a dark suit of somewhat masculine cut. She wore a collar and tie and
as a pin the crest of a famous English regiment.

"He's good-looking," she said. "These ladies will be pleased to see
him."

"Where is Madame to-night?"

"She's gone home to spend the holidays with her family. I am in charge."

"We'll go in, shall we?"

"You know your way."

The two young men passed along the passage and opening a door found
themselves in a vast room garishly decorated in the pinchbeck style of a
Turkish bath. There were settees round the walls and in front of them
little tables and chairs. A fair sprinkling of people were sitting
about, mostly in day clothes, but a few in dinner-jackets; men in twos
and threes; and at one table a mixed party, the women in evening frocks,
who had evidently come to see one of the sights of Paris. Waiters in
Turkish dress stood about and attended to orders. On a platform was an
orchestra consisting of a pianist, a fiddler and a man who played the
saxophone. Two benches facing one another jutted out on to the dance
floor and on these sat ten or twelve young women. They wore Turkish
slippers, but with high heels, baggy trousers of some shimmering
material that reached to their ankles, and small turbans on their heads.
The upper part of their bodies was naked. Other girls similarly dressed
were seated with men who were standing a drink. Simon and Charley sat
down and ordered a bottle of champagne. The band started up. Three or
four men rose to their feet and going over to the benches chose partners
to dance with. The rest of the girls listlessly danced together. They
talked in a desultory way to one another and threw inquisitive glances
at the men who were sitting at the various tables. It was apparent that
the party of sight-seers, with the smart women from a different world,
excited their curiosity. On the face of it, except that the girls were
half-naked, there was nothing to distinguish the place from any night
club but the fact that there was room to dance in comfort. Charley
noticed that at a table near theirs two men with dispatch-cases, from
which in the course of conversation they extracted papers, were talking
business as unconcernedly as if they were in a caf. Presently one of
the men from the group of sightseers went and spoke to two girls who
were dancing together, whereupon they stopped and went up to the table
from which he had come; one of the women, beautifully dressed in black,
with a string of emeralds round her neck, got up and began dancing with
one of the two girls. The other went back to the bench and sat down. The
_sous-matresse_, the woman in the coat and skirt, came up to Simon and
Charley.

"Well, does your friend see any of these ladies who takes his fancy?"

"Sit down with us a minute and have a drink. He's having a look round.
The night's young yet."

She sat down and, when Simon called the waiter, ordered an orangeade.

"I'm sorry he's come here for the first time on such a quiet night. You
see, on Christmas Eve a lot of people have to stay at home. But it'll
get more lively presently. A crowd of English have come over to Paris
for the holidays. I saw in the paper that they're running the Golden
Arrow in three sections. They're a great nation, the English; they have
money."

Charley, feeling rather shy, was silent, and she asked Simon if he
understood French.

"Of course he does. He spent six months in Touraine to learn it."

"What a beautiful district! Last summer when I took my holiday I motored
all through the Chteaux country. Angle comes from Tours. Perhaps your
friend would like to dance with her." She turned to Charley. "You do
dance, don't you?"

"Yes, I like it."

"She's very well-educated and she comes from an excellent family. I went
to see them when I was in Tours and they thanked me for all that I had
done for their daughter. They were persons of the greatest
respectability. You mustn't think that we take anyone here. Madame is
very particular. We have our name and we value it. All these ladies here
come from families who are highly esteemed in their own town. That is
why they like to work in Paris. Naturally they don't want to cause
embarrassment to their relations. Life is hard and one has to earn one's
living as best one can. Of course I don't pretend that they belong to
the aristocracy, but the aristocracy in France is thoroughly corrupt,
and for my part I set much greater value on the good French bourgeois
stock. That is the backbone of the country."

Mademoiselle Ernestine gave you the impression of a sensible woman of
sound principle. You could not but feel that her views on the social
questions of the day would be well worth listening to. She patted
Simon's hand and again speaking to Charley said:

"It always gives me pleasure to see Monsieur Simon. He's a good friend
of the house. He doesn't come very often, but when he does he behaves
like a gentleman. He is never drunk like some of your compatriots and
one can talk to him of interesting subjects. We are always glad to see
journalists here. Sometimes I think the life we lead is a little narrow
and it does one good to talk to someone who is in the centre of things.
It takes one out of one's rut. He's sympathetic."

In those surroundings, as though he felt himself strangely at home,
Simon was easy and genial. If he was acting, it was a very good
performance that he was giving. You would have thought that he felt some
queer affinity between himself and the _sous-matresse_ of the brothel.

"Once he took me to a _rptition gnrale_ at the Franais. All Paris
was there. Academicians, ministers, generals. I was dazzled."

"And I may add that not one of the women looked more distinguished than
you. It did my reputation a lot of good to be seen with you."

"You should have seen the faces of some of the big-wigs who come here,
when they saw me in the foyer walking on the arm of Monsieur Simon."

Charley knew that to go to a great social function with such a companion
was the kind of joke that appealed to Simon's sardonic humour. They
talked a little more and then Simon said:

"Listen, my dear, I think we ought to do our young friend proud as it's
the first time he's been here. What about introducing him to the
Princess? Don't you think he'd like her?"

Mademoiselle Ernestine's strong features relaxed into a smile and she
gave Charley an amused glance.

"It's an idea. It would at least be an experience that he hasn't had
before. She has a pretty figure."

"Let's have her along and stand her a drink."

Mademoiselle Ernestine called a waiter.

"Tell the Princess Olga to come here." Then to Charley: "She's Russian.
Of course since the revolution we have been swamped with Russians, we're
fed to the teeth with them and their Slav temperament; for a time the
clients were amused by it, but they're tired of them now. And then
they're not serious. They're noisy and quarrelsome. The truth is,
they're barbarians, and they don't know how to behave. But Princess Olga
is different. She has principles. You can see that she's been well
brought up. She has something, there's no denying it."

While she was speaking Charley saw the waiter go up to a girl who was
sitting on one of the benches and speak to her. His eyes had been
wandering and he had noticed her before. She sat strangely still, and
you would have thought that she was unconscious of her surroundings. She
got up now, gave a glance in their direction, and walked slowly towards
them. There was a singular nonchalance in her gait. When she came up she
gave Simon a slight smile and they shook hands.

"I saw you come in just now," she said, as she sat down.

Simon asked her if she would drink a glass of champagne.

"I don't mind."

"This is a friend of mine who wants to know you."

"I'm flattered." She turned an unsmiling glance on Charley. She looked
at him for a time that seemed to him embarrassingly long, but her eyes
held neither welcome nor invitation; their perfect indifference was
almost nettling. "He's handsome." Charley smiled shyly and then the
faintest suspicion of a smile trembled on her lips. "He looks
good-natured."

Her turban, her baggy trousers were of gauze, pale blue and thickly
sprinkled with little silver stars. She was not very tall; her face was
heavily made up, her cheeks extravagantly rouged, her lips scarlet and
her eyelids blue; eyebrows and eyelashes were black with mascara. She
was certainly not beautiful, she was only prettyish, with rather high
cheek-bones, a fleshy little nose and eyes not set deep in their
sockets, not prominent either, but on a level as it were with her face,
like windows set flush with a wall. They were large and blue, and their
blue, emphasised both by the colour of her turban and by the mascara,
was like a flame. She had a neat, trim, slight figure, and the skin of
her body, pale amber in hue, had a look of silky softness. Her breasts
were small and round, virginal, and the well-shaped nipples were rosy.

"Why don't you ask the Princess to dance with you, Charley?" said Simon.

"Will you?" said he.

She gave the very faintest shrug of one shoulder and without a word rose
to her feet. At the same time Mademoiselle Ernestine, saying she had
affairs to attend to, left them. It was a new and thrilling experience
for Charley to dance with a girl with nothing on above the waist. It
made him rather breathless to put his hand on her naked body and to feel
her bare breasts against him. The hand which he held in his was small
and soft. But he was a well-brought-up young man, with good manners, and
feeling it was only decent to make polite conversation, talked in the
same way as he would have to any girl at a dance in London whom he did
not know. She answered civilly enough, but he had a notion that she was
not giving much heed to what he said. Her eyes wandered vaguely about
the room, but there was no indication that they found there anything to
excite her interest. When he clasped her a little more closely to him
she accepted the more intimate hold without any sign that she noticed
it. She acquiesced. The band stopped playing and they returned to their
table. Simon was sitting there alone.

"Well, does she dance well?" he asked.

"Not very."

Suddenly she laughed. It was the first sign of animation she had given
and her laugh was frank and gay.

"I'm sorry," she said, speaking English, "I wasn't attending. I can
dance better than that and next turn I will."

Charley flushed.

"I didn't know you spoke English. I wouldn't have said that."

"But it was quite true. And you dance so well, you deserve a partner who
can dance too."

Hitherto they had spoken French. Charley's was not very accurate, but it
was fluent enough, and his accent was good. She spoke it very well, but
with the sing-song Russian intonation which gives the language an alien
monotony. Her English was not bad.

"The Princess was educated in England," said Simon.

"I went there when I was two and stayed till I was fourteen. I haven't
spoken it much since then and I've forgotten."

"Where did you live?"

"In London. In Ladbroke Grove. In Charlotte Street. Wherever it was
cheap."

"I'm going to leave you young things now," said Simon. "I'll see you
to-morrow, Charley."

"Aren't you going to the Mass?"

"No."

He left them with a casual nod.

"Have you known Monsieur Simon long?" asked the Princess.

"He's my oldest friend."

"Do you like him?"

"Of course."

"He's very different from you. I should have thought he was the last
person you would have taken to."

"He's brilliantly clever. He's been a very good friend to me."

She opened her mouth to speak, but then seemed to think better of it,
and kept silent. The music began to play once more.

"Will you dance with me again?" she asked. "I want to show you that I
_can_ dance when I want to."

Perhaps it was because Simon had left them and she felt less constraint,
perhaps it was something in Charley's manner, maybe his confusion when
he had realised that she spoke English, that had made her take notice of
him, there was a difference in her altitude. It had now a kindliness
which was unexpected and attractive. While they danced she talked with
something approaching gaiety. She went back to her childhood and spoke
with a sort of grim humour of the squalor in which she and her parents
had lived in cheap London lodgings. And now, taking the trouble to
follow Charley's steps, she danced very well. They sat down again and
Charley glanced at his watch; it was getting on towards midnight. He was
in a quandary. He had often heard them speak at home of the church music
at St. Eustache, and the opportunity of hearing Mass there on Christmas
Eve was one that he could not miss. The thrill of arriving in Paris, his
talk with Simon, the new experience of the Srail and the champagne he
had drunk, had combined to fill him with a singular exaltation and he
had an urgent desire to hear music; it was as strong as his physical
desire for the girl he had been dancing with. It seemed silly to go at
this particular juncture and for such a purpose; but there it was, he
wanted to, and after all nobody need know.

"Look," he said, with an engaging smile, "I've got a date. I must go
away now, but I shall be back in an hour. I shall still find you here,
shan't I?"

"I'm here all night."

"But you won't get fixed up with anybody else?"

"Why have you got to go away?"

He smiled a trifle shyly.

"I'm afraid it sounds absurd, but my friend has given me a couple of
tickets for the Mass at St. Eustache, and I may never have another
opportunity of hearing it."

"Who are you going with?"

"Nobody."

"Will you take me?"

"You? But how could you get away?"

"I can arrange that with Mademoiselle. Give me a couple of hundred
francs and I'll fix it."

He gave her a doubtful glance. With her naked body, her powder-blue
turban and trousers, her painted face, she did not look the sort of
person to go to church with. She saw his glance and laughed.

"I'd give anything in the world to go. Do, do. I can change in ten
minutes. It would give me so much pleasure."

"All right."

He gave her the money and telling him to wait for her in the entrance,
she hurried away. He paid for the wine and after ten minutes, counted on
his watch, went out.

As he stepped into the passage a girl came up to him.

"I haven't kept you waiting, you see. I've explained to Mademoiselle.
Anyway she thinks Russians are mad."

Until she spoke he had not recognised her. She wore a brown coat and
skirt and a felt hat. She had taken off her make-up, even the red on her
lips, and her eyes under the thin fair line of her shaven eyebrows
looked neither so large nor so blue. In her brown clothes, neat but
cheap, she looked nondescript. She might have been a work-girl such as
you see pouring along side-streets from the back door of a department
store at the luncheon hour. She was hardly even pretty, but she looked
very young; and there was something humble in her bearing that gave
Charley a pang.

"Do you like music, Princess?" he asked, when they got into a taxi.

He did not quite know what to call her. Even though she was a
prostitute, he felt it would be rude, with her rank, on so short an
acquaintance to call her Olga, and if she had been reduced to so
humiliating a position by the stress of circumstances it behooved him
all the more to treat her with respect.

"I'm not a princess, you know, and my name isn't Olga. They call me that
at the Srail because it flatters the clients to think they are going to
bed with a princess and they call me Olga because it's the only Russian
name they know besides Sasha. My father was a professor of economics at
the University at Leningrad and my mother was the daughter of a Customs
official."

"What is your name, then?"

"Lydia."

They arrived just as the Mass was beginning. There were crowds of people
and no chance of getting a seat. It was bitterly cold and Charley asked
her if she would like his coat. She shook her head without answering.
The aisles were lit by naked electric globes and they threw harsh beams
on the vaulting, the columns and the dark throng of worshippers. The
choir was brilliantly lit. They found a place by a column where,
protected by its shadow, they could feel themselves isolated. There was
an orchestra on a raised platform. At the altar were priests in splendid
vestments. The music seemed to Charley somewhat florid, and he listened
to it with a faint sense of disappointment. It did not move him as he
had expected it would and the soloists, with their metallic, operatic
voices, left him cold. He had a feeling that he was listening to a
performance rather than attending a religious ceremony, and it excited
in him no sensation of reverence. But for all that he was glad to have
come. The darkness into which the light from the electric globes cut
like a bright knife, making the Gothic lines grimmer; the soft
brilliance of the altar, with its multitude of candles, with the priests
performing actions whose meaning was unknown to him; the silent crowd
that seemed not to participate but to wait anxiously like a crowd at a
station barrier waiting for the gate to open; the stench of wet clothes
and the aromatic perfume of incense; the bitter cold that lowered like a
threatening unseen presence: it was not a religious emotion that he got
from all this, but the sense of a mystery that had its roots far back in
the origins of the human race. His nerves were taut, and when on a
sudden the choir to the full accompaniment of the orchestra burst with a
great shout into the _Adeste Fideles_ he was seized with an exultation
over he knew not what. Then a boy sang a canticle; the thin, silvery
voice rose in the silence and the notes trickled, with a curious little
hesitation at first, as though the singer were not quite sure of
himself, trickled like water crystal-clear trickling over the white
stones of a brook; and then, the singer gathering assurance, the sounds
were caught up, as though by great dark hands, and borne into the
intricate curves of the arches and up to the night of the vaulted roof.
Suddenly Charley was conscious that the girl by his side, Lydia, was
crying. It gave him a bit of a turn, but with his polite English
reticence he pretended not to notice; he thought that the dark church
and the pure sound of the boy's voice had filled her with a sudden sense
of shame. He was an imaginative youth and he had read many novels. He
could guess, he fancied, what she was feeling and he was seized with a
great pity for her. He found it curious, however, that she should be so
moved by music that was not of the best quality. But now she began to be
shaken by heavy sobs and he could pretend no longer that he did not know
she was in trouble. He put out a hand and took hers, thinking to offer
her thus the comfort of his sympathy, but she snatched away her hand
almost roughly. He began to be embarrassed. She was now crying so
violently that the bystanders could not but notice it. She was making an
exhibition of herself and he went hot with shame.

"Would you like to go out?" he whispered.

She shook her head angrily. Her sobbing grew more and more convulsive
and suddenly she sank down on her knees and, burying her face in her
hands, gave herself up to uncontrolled weeping. She was heaped up on
herself strangely, like a bundle of cast-off clothes, and except for the
quivering shoulders you would have thought her in a dead faint. She lay
crouched at the foot of the tall pillar, and Charley, miserably
self-conscious, stood in front of her trying to protect her from view.
He saw a number of persons cast curious glances at her and then at him.
It made him angry to think what they must suppose. The musicians were
hushed, the choir was mute, and the silence had a thrilling quality of
awe. Communicants, serried row upon row, pressed up to the altar steps
to take in their mouths the Sacred Host that the priest offered them.
Charley's delicacy prevented him from looking at Lydia and he kept his
eyes fixed on the bright-lit chancel. But when she raised herself a
little he was conscious of her movement. She turned to the pillar and
putting her arm against it hid her face in the crook of her elbow. The
passion of her weeping had exhausted her, but the way in which she now
sprawled, leaning against the hard stone, her bent legs on the stone
paving, expressed such a hopelessness of woe that it was even more
intolerable than to see her crushed and bowed on the floor like a person
thrown into an unnatural attitude by a violent death.

The service reached its close. The organ joined with the orchestra for
the voluntary, and an increasing stream of people, anxious to get to
their cars or to find taxis, streamed to the doors. Then it was
finished, and a great throng swept down the length of the church.
Charley waited till they were alone in the place they had chosen and the
last thick wedge of people seemed to be pressing to the doors. He put
his hand on her shoulder.

"Come. We must go now."

He put his arm round her and lifted her to her feet. Inert, she let him
do what he liked. She held her eyes averted. Linking her arm in his he
led her down the aisle and waited again a little till all but a dozen
people had gone out.

"Would you like to walk a few steps?"

"No, I'm so tired. Let's get into a taxi."

But they had to walk a little after all, for they could not immediately
find one. When they came to a street lamp she stopped and taking a
mirror from her bag looked at herself. Her eyes were swollen. She took
out a puff and dabbed it over her face.

"There's not much to be done," he said, with a kindly smile. "We'd
better go and have a drink somewhere. You can't go back to the Srail
like that."

"When I cry my eyes always swell. It'll take hours to go down."

Just then a taxi passed and Charley hailed it.

"Where shall we go?"

"I don't care. The Select. Boulevard Montparnasse."

He gave the address and they drove across the river. When they arrived
he hesitated, for the place she had chosen seemed crowded, but she
stepped out of the taxi and he followed her. Notwithstanding the cold a
lot of people were sitting on the terrace. They found a table within.

"I'll go into the ladies' room and wash my eyes."

In a few minutes she returned and sat down by his side. She had pulled
down her hat as far as she could to hide her swollen lids and had
powdered herself, but she had put on no rouge and her face was white.
She was quite calm. She said nothing about the passion of weeping that
had overcome her and you might have thought she took it as a natural
thing that needed no excuse.

"I'm very hungry," she said. "You must be hungry, too."

Charley was ravenous and while he waited for her had wondered whether in
the circumstances it would seem very gross if he ordered himself bacon
and eggs. Her remark relieved his mind. It appeared that bacon and eggs
were just what she fancied. He wanted to order a bottle of champagne,
thinking she needed the stimulant, but she would not let him.

"Why should you waste your money? Let's have some beer."

They ate their simple meal with appetite. They talked little. Charley,
with his good manners, tried to make polite conversation, but she did
not encourage him and presently they fell into silence. When they had
finished and had had coffee, he asked Lydia what she would like to do.

"I should like to sit here. I'm fond of this place. It's cosy and
intimate. I like to look at the people who come here."

"All right, we'll sit here."

It was not exactly how he had proposed to pass his first night in Paris.
He wished he hadn't been such a fool as to take her to the Midnight
Mass. He had not the heart to be unkind to her. But perhaps there was
some intonation in his reply that struck her, for she turned a little to
look him in the face. She gave him once more the smile he had already
seen two or three times on her. It was a queer sort of smile. It hardly
moved the lips; it held no gaiety, but was not devoid of kindliness;
there was more irony in it than amusement and it was rare and unwilling,
patient and disillusioned.

"This can't be very amusing for you. Why don't you go back to the Srail
and leave me here?"

"No, I won't do that."

"I don't mind being alone, you know. I sometimes come here by myself and
sit for hours. You've come to Paris to enjoy yourself. You'd be a fool
not to."

"If it doesn't bore you I'd like to sit here with you."

"Why?" She gave him on a sudden a disdainful glance. "Do you look upon
yourself as being noble and self-sacrificing? Or are you sorry for me or
only curious?"

Charley could not imagine why she seemed angry with him or why she said
these wounding things.

"Why should I feel sorry for you? Or curious?"

He meant her to understand that she was not the first prostitute he had
met in his life and he was not likely to be impressed with a life-story
which was probably sordid and in all likelihood untrue. Lydia stared at
him with an expression which to him looked like incredulous surprise.

"What did your friend Simon tell you about me?"

"Nothing."

"Why do you redden when you say that?"

"I didn't know I reddened," he smiled.

In fact Simon had told him that she was not a bad romp, and would give
him his money's worth, but that was not the sort of thing he felt
inclined to tell her just then. With her pale face and swollen eyelids,
in that poor brown dress and the black felt hat, there was nothing to
remind one of the creature, in her blue Turkish trousers, with a naked
body, who had had a curious, exotic attractiveness. It was another
person altogether, quiet, respectable, demure, with whom Charley could
as little think of going to bed as with one of the junior mistresses at
Patsy's old school. Lydia relapsed into silence. She seemed to be sunk
in reverie. When at last she spoke it was as though she were continuing
her train of thought rather than addressing him.

"If I cried just now in church it wasn't for the reason that you
thought. I've cried enough for that, heaven knows, but just then it was
for something different. I felt so lonely. All those people, they have a
country and, in that country, homes; to-morrow they'll spend Christmas
Day together, father and mother and children; some of them, like you,
went only to hear the music, and some have no faith, but just then, all
of them, they were joined together by a common feeling; that ceremony,
which they've known all their lives, and whose meaning is in their
blood, every word spoken, every action of the priests, is familiar to
them, and even if they don't believe with their minds, the awe, the
mystery, is in their bones and they believe with their hearts; it is
part of the recollections of their childhood, the gardens they played
in, the countryside, the streets of the towns. It binds them together,
it makes them one, and some deep instinct tells them that they belong to
one another. But I am a stranger. I have no country, I have no home, I
have no language. I belong nowhere. I am outcast."

She gave a mournful little chuckle.

"I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for
the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that
I've read of in books and, though I try and try, I can't see them with
my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I
sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the
straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read
about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at
all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak
English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for
me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own
people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a
country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you
understand without knowing them--how can you tell what it is to belong
nowhere?"

"But have you no relations at all?"

"Not one. My father was a socialist, but he was a quiet, peaceable man
absorbed in his studies, and he took no active part in politics. He
welcomed the revolution and thought it was the opening of a new era for
Russia. He accepted the Bolsheviks. He only asked to be allowed to go on
with his work at the university. But they turned him out and one day he
got news that he was going to be arrested. We escaped through Finland,
my father, my mother and me. I was two. We lived in England for twelve
years. How, I don't know. Sometimes my father got a little work to do,
sometimes people helped us, but my father was homesick. Except when he
was a student in Berlin he'd never been out of Russia before; he
couldn't accustom himself to English life, and at last he felt he had to
go back. My mother implored him not to. He couldn't help himself, he had
to go, the desire was too strong for him; he got into touch with people
at the Russian Embassy in London, he said he was prepared to do any work
the Bolsheviks gave him; he had a good reputation in Russia, his books
had been widely praised, and he was an authority on his subject. They
promised him everything and he sailed. When the ship docked he was taken
off by the agents of the Cheka. We heard that he'd been taken to a cell
on the fourth floor of the prison and thrown out of the window. They
said he'd committed suicide."

She sighed a little and lit another cigarette. She had been smoking
incessantly since they finished supper.

"He was a mild, gentle creature. He never did anyone harm. My mother
told me that all the years they'd been married he'd never said a harsh
word to her. Because he'd made his peace with the Bolsheviks the people
who'd helped us before wouldn't help us any more. My mother thought we'd
be better off in Paris. She had friends there. They got her work
addressing letters. I was apprenticed to a dressmaker. My mother died
because there wasn't enough to eat for both of us and she denied herself
so that I shouldn't go hungry. I found a job with a dressmaker who gave
me half the usual wages because I was Russian. If those friends of my
mother's, Alexey and Evgenia, hadn't given me a bed to sleep in I should
have starved too. Alexey played the violin in an orchestra at a Russian
restaurant and Evgenia ran the ladies' cloak-room. They had three
children and the six of us lived in two rooms. Alexey was a lawyer by
profession, he'd been one of my father's pupils at the university."

"But you have them still?"

"Yes, I have them still. They're very poor now. You see, everyone's sick
of the Russians, they're sick of Russian restaurants and Russian
orchestras. Alexey hasn't had a job for four years. He's grown bitter
and quarrelsome and he drinks. One of the girls has been taken charge of
by an aunt who lives at Nice, and another has gone into service, the son
has become a gigolo and he does the night clubs at Montmartre; he's
often here, I don't know why he isn't here this evening, perhaps he's
clicked. His father curses him and beats him when he's drunk, but the
hundred francs he brings home when he's found a friend helps to keep
things going. I live there still."

"Do you?" said Charley in surprise.

"I must live somewhere. I don't go to the Srail till night and when
trade is slack I often get back by four or five. But it's terribly far
away."

For a while they sat in silence.

"What did you mean when you said just now you hadn't been crying for the
reason I thought?" asked Charley at length.

She gave him once more a curious, suspicious look.

"Do you really mean that you don't know who I am? I thought that was why
your friend Simon sent for me."

"He told me nothing except--except that you'd give me a good time."

"I'm the wife of Robert Berger. That is why, although I'm a Russian,
they took me at the Srail. It gives the clients a kick."

"I'm afraid you'll think me very stupid, but I honestly don't know what
you're talking about."

She gave a short, hard laugh.

"Such is fame. A day's journey and the name that's on every lip means
nothing. Robert Berger murdered an English bookmaker called Teddie
Jordan. He was condemned to fifteen years' penal servitude. He's at St.
Laurent in French Guiana."

She spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that Charley could hardly believe
his ears. He was startled, horrified and thrilled.

"And you really didn't know?"

"I give you my word I didn't. Now you speak of it I remember reading
about the case in the English papers. It created rather a sensation
because the--the victim was English, but I'd forgotten the name of
the--of your husband."

"It created a sensation in France, too. The trial lasted three days.
People fought to get to it. The papers gave it the whole of their front
page. No one talked of anything else. Oh, it was a sensation all right.
That was when I first saw your friend Simon, at least that's when he
first saw me, he was reporting the case for his paper and I was in
court. It was an exciting trial, it gave the journalists plenty of
opportunity. You must get him to tell you about it. He's proud of the
articles he wrote. They were so clever, bits of them got translated and
were put in the French papers. It did him a lot of good."

Charley did not know what to say. He was angry with Simon; he recognised
his puckish humour in putting him in the situation in which he now found
himself.

"It must have been awful for you," he said lamely.

She turned a little and looked into his eyes. He, whose life had been
set in pleasant places, had never before seen on a face a look of such
hideous despair. It hardly looked like a human face, but like one of
those Japanese masks which an artist has fashioned to portray a certain
emotion. He shivered. Lydia till now, for Charley's sake, had been
talking mostly in English, breaking into French now and then when she
found it too difficult to say what she wanted in the unfamiliar
language, but now she went on in French. The sing-song of her Russian
accent gave it a strange plaintiveness, but at the same time lent a
sense of unreality to what she said. It gave you the impression of a
person talking in a dream.

"I'd only been married six months. I was going to have a baby. Perhaps
it was that that saved his neck. That and his youth. He was only
twenty-two. The baby was born dead. I'd suffered too much. You see, I
loved him. He was my first love and my last love. When he was sentenced
they wanted me to divorce him, transportation is a sufficient reason in
French law; they told me that the wives of convicts always divorced and
they were angry with me when I wouldn't. The lawyer who defended him was
very kind to me. He said that I'd done everything I could, and that I'd
had a bad time, but I'd stood by him to the end and now I ought to think
of myself, I was young and must remake my life, I was making it even
more difficult if I stayed tied to a convict. He was impatient with me
when I said that I loved Robert and Robert was the only thing in the
world that mattered to me, and that whatever he did I'd love him, and
that if ever I could go out to him, and he wanted me, I'd go and gladly.
At last he shrugged his shoulders and said there was nothing to be done
with us Russians, but if ever I changed my mind and wanted a divorce I
was to come to him and he'd help me. And Evgenia and Alexey, poor
drunken, worthless Alexey, they gave me no peace. They said Robert was a
scoundrel, they said he was wicked, they said it was disgraceful that I
should love him. As if one could stop loving because it's disgraceful to
love! It's so easy to call a man a scoundrel. What does it mean? He
murdered and he suffered for his crime. None of them knew him as I knew
him. You see, he loved me. They didn't know how tender he was, how
charming, how gay, how boyish. They said he came near killing me as he
killed Teddie Jordan; they didn't see that it only made me love him
more."

It was almost impossible for Charley, knowing nothing of the
circumstances to get anything coherent out of what she was saying.

"Why should he have killed you?" he asked.

"When he came home--after he'd killed Jordan, it was very late and I'd
gone to bed, but his mother was waiting up for him. We lived with her.
He was in high spirits, but when she looked at him she knew he'd done
something terrible. You see, for weeks she'd been expecting it and she'd
been frantic with anxiety.

"'Where have you been all this time?' she asked him.

"'I? Nowhere,' he said. 'Round with the boys.' He chuckled and gently
patted her cheek. 'It's so easy to kill a man, Mother,' he said. 'It's
quite ridiculous, it's so easy.'

"Then she knew what he'd done and she burst out crying.

"'Your poor wife,' she said. 'Oh, how desperately unhappy you're going
to make her.'

"He looked down and sighed.

"'Perhaps it would be better if I killed her too,' he said.

"'Robert!' she cried.

"He shook his head.

"'Don't be afraid, I shouldn't have the courage,' he said. 'And yet, if
I did it in her sleep, she'd know nothing.'

"'My God, why did you do it?' she cried.

"Suddenly he laughed. He had a wonderfully gay, infectious laugh. You
couldn't hear it without feeling happy.

"'Don't be so silly, Mother, I was only joking,' he said. 'I've done
nothing. Go to bed and to sleep.'

"She knew he was lying. But that's all he would say. At last she went to
her room. It was a tiny house, in Neuilly, but it had a bit of garden
and there was a little pavilion at the end of it. When we married she
gave us the house and moved in there so that she could be with her son
and yet not on the top of us. Robert came up to our room and he waked me
with a kiss on my lips. His eyes were shining. He had blue eyes, not so
blue as yours, grey rather, but they were large and very brilliant.
There was almost always a smile in them. They were wonderfully alert."

But Lydia had gradually slowed down the pace of her speech as she came
to these sentences. It was as though a thought had struck her and she
was turning it over in her mind while she talked. She looked at Charley
with a curious expression.

"There _is_ something in your eyes that reminds me of him, and your face
is the same shape as his. He wasn't so tall as you and he hadn't got
your English complexion. He was very good-looking." She was silent for a
moment. "What a malicious fool that Simon of yours is."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing."

She leant forward, with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands,
and went on, in a rather monotonous voice, as though she were reciting
under hypnosis something that was passing before her vacant eyes.

"I smiled when I woke.

"'How late you are,' I said. 'Be quick and come to bed.'

"'I can't sleep now,' he said. 'I'm too excited. I'm hungry. Are there
any eggs in the kitchen?'

"I was wide awake by then. You can't think how charming he looked
sitting on the side of the bed in his new grey suit. He was always
well-dressed and he wore his clothes wonderfully well. His hair was very
beautiful, dark brown and waving, and he wore it long, brushed back on
his head.

"'I'll put on a dressing-gown and we'll go and see,' I said.

"We went into the kitchen and I found eggs and onions. I fried the
onions and scrambled them with the eggs. I made some toast. Sometimes
when we went to the theatre or had been to a concert we used to make
ourselves something to eat when we got home. He loved scrambled eggs and
onions, and I cooked them just in the way he liked. We used to love
those modest suppers that we had by ourselves in the kitchen. He went
into the cellar and brought out a bottle of champagne. I knew his mother
would be cross; it was the last of half a dozen bottles that Robert had
had given him by one of his racing friends, but he said he felt like
champagne just then and he opened the bottle. He ate the eggs greedily
and he emptied his glass at a gulp. He was in tearing spirits. When we
first got into the kitchen I'd noticed that though his eyes were shining
so brightly his face was pale, and if I hadn't known that nothing was
more unlikely I should have thought he'd been drinking, but now the
colour came back to his cheeks. I thought he'd been just tired and
hungry. He'd been out all day, tearing about, I was sure, and it might
be that he hadn't had a bite to eat. Although we'd only been parted a
few hours he was almost crazy with joy at being with me again. He
couldn't stop kissing me and while I was scrambling the eggs I had to
push him away because he wanted to hug me and I was afraid he'd spoil
the cooking. But I couldn't help laughing. We sat side by side at the
kitchen table as close as we could get. He called me every sweet,
endearing name he could think of, he couldn't keep his hands off me, you
would have thought we'd only been married a week instead of six months.
When we'd finished I wanted to wash everything up so that when his
mother came in for breakfast she shouldn't find a mess, but he wouldn't
let me. He wanted to get to bed quickly.

"He was like a man possessed of a god. I never thought it was possible
for a man to love a woman as he loved me that night. I never knew a
woman was capable of such adoration as I was filled with. He was
insatiable. It seemed impossible to slake his passion. No woman ever had
such a wonderful lover as I had that night. And he was my husband. Mine!
Mine! I worshipped him. If he'd let me I would have kissed his feet.
When at last he fell asleep exhausted, the dawn was already peeping
through a chink in the curtains. But I couldn't sleep. I looked at his
face as the light grew stronger; it was the unlined face of a boy. He
slept, holding me in his arms, and there was a tiny smile of happiness
on his lips. At last I fell asleep too.

"He was still sleeping when I woke and I got out of bed very quietly so
as not to disturb him. I went into the kitchen to make his coffee for
him. We were very poor. Robert had worked in a broker's office, but he'd
had a quarrel with his employer and had walked out on him, and since
then he hadn't found anything regular to do. He was crazy about racing
and sometimes he made a bit that way, though his mother hated it, and
occasionally he earned a little money by selling second-hand cars on
commission, but all we really had to depend on was his mother's
pension--she was the widow of an army doctor--and the little money she
had besides. We didn't keep a servant and my mother-in-law and I did the
housework. I found her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for lunch.

"'How is Robert?' she asked me.

"'He's still asleep. I wish you could see him. With his hair all tousled
he looks as if he was sixteen.'

"The coffee was on the hob and the milk was warm. I put it on to boil
and had a cup, then I crept upstairs to get Robert's clothes. He was a
dressy fellow and I'd learnt how to press them. I wanted to have them
all ready for him and neatly laid out on a chair when he woke. I brought
them down into the kitchen and gave them a brush and then I put an iron
on to heat. When I put the trousers on the kitchen table I noticed there
were stains on one of the legs.

"'What on earth is that?' I cried. 'Robert _has_ got his trousers in a
mess.'

"Madame Berger got up from her chair so quickly that she upset the
potatoes. She snatched up the trousers and looked at them. She began to
tremble.

"'I wonder what it is,' I said. 'Robert will be furious. His new suit.'

"I saw she was upset, but, you know, the French are funny in some ways,
they don't take things like that as casually as we Russians do. I don't
know how many hundred francs Robert had paid for the suit, and if it was
ruined she wouldn't sleep for a week thinking of all the money that had
been wasted.

"'It'll clean,' I said.

"'Take Robert up his coffee,' she said sharply. 'It's after eleven and
quite time he woke. Leave me the trousers. I know what to do with them.'

"I poured him out a cup and was just going upstairs with it when we
heard Robert clattering down in his slippers. He nodded to his mother
and asked for the paper.

"'Drink your coffee while it's hot,' I said to him.

"He paid no attention to me. He opened the paper and turned to the
latest news.

"'There's nothing,' said his mother.

"I didn't know what she meant. He cast his eyes down the columns and
then took a long drink of coffee. He was unusually silent. I took his
coat and began to give it a brush.

"'You made your trousers in an awful mess last night,' I said. 'You'll
have to wear your blue suit to-day.'

"Madame Berger had put them over the back of a chair. She took them to
him and showed him the stains. He looked at them for a minute while she
watched him in silence. You would have thought he couldn't take his eyes
off them. I couldn't understand their silence. It was strange. I thought
they were taking a trivial accident in an absurdly tragic way. But of
course the French have thrift in their bones.

"'We've got some petrol in the house,' I said. 'We can get the stains
out with that. Or they can go to the cleaner's.'

"They didn't answer. Robert, frowning, looked down. His mother turned
the trousers round, I suppose to look if there were stains on the back,
and then, I think, felt that there was something in the pockets.

"'What have you got here?'

"He sprang to his feet.

"'Leave it alone. I won't have you look in my pockets.'

"He tried to snatch the trousers from her, but before he could do so she
had slipped her hand into the hip-pocket and taken out a bundle of
bank-notes. He stopped dead when he saw that she had them. She let the
trousers drop to the ground and with a groan put her hand to her breast
as though she'd been stabbed. I saw then that they were both of them as
pale as death. A sudden thought seized me; Robert had often said to me
that he was sure his mother had a little hoard hidden away somewhere in
the house. We'd been terribly short of money lately. Robert was crazy to
go down to the Riviera; I'd never been there and he'd been saying for
weeks that if he could only get a bit of cash we'd go down and have a
honeymoon at last. You see, at the time we married he was working at
that broker's and couldn't get away. The thought flashed through my mind
that he'd found his mother's hoard. I blushed to the roots of my hair at
the idea that he'd stolen it and yet I wasn't surprised. I hadn't lived
with him for six months without knowing that he'd think it rather a
lark. I saw that they were thousand-franc notes that she held in her
hand. Afterwards I knew there were seven of them. She looked at him as
though her eyes would start out of her head.

"'When did you get them, Robert?' she asked.

"He gave a laugh, but I saw he was nervous.

"'I made a lucky bet yesterday,' he answered.

"'Oh, Robert,' I cried, 'you promised your mother you'd never play the
horses again.'

"'This was a certainty,' he said, 'I couldn't resist. We shall be able
to go down to the Riviera, my sweet. You take them and keep them or
they'll just slip through my fingers.'

"'No, no, she mustn't have them,' cried Madame Berger. She gave Robert a
look of real horror, so that I was astounded, then she turned to me. 'Go
and do your room. I won't have the rooms left unmade all day long.'

"I saw she wanted to get rid of me and I thought I'd be better out of
the way if they were going to quarrel. The position of a daughter-in-law
is delicate. His mother worshipped Robert, but he was extravagant and it
worried her to death. Now and then she made a scene. Sometimes they'd
shut themselves up in her pavilion at the end of the garden and I'd hear
their voices raised in violent discussions. He would come away sulky and
irritable and when I saw her I knew she'd been crying. I went upstairs.
When I came down again they stopped talking at once and Madame Berger
told me to go out and buy some eggs for lunch. Generally Robert went out
about noon and didn't come back till night, often very late, but that
day he stayed in. He read and played the piano. I asked him what had
passed between him and his mother, but he wouldn't tell me, he told me
to mind my own business. I think neither of them spoke more than a dozen
sentences all day. I thought it would never end. When we went to bed I
snuggled up to Robert and put my arms round his neck, for of course I
knew he was worried and I wanted to console him, but he pushed me away.

"'For God's sake leave me alone,' he said. 'I'm in no mood for
love-making to-night. I've got other things to think about.'

"I was bitterly wounded, but I didn't speak. I moved away from him. He
knew he'd hurt me, for in a little while he put out his hand and lightly
touched my face.

"'Go to sleep, my sweet,' he said. 'Don't be upset because I'm in a bad
humour to-day. I drank too much yesterday. I shall be all right
to-morrow.'

"'Was it your mother's money?' I whispered.

"He didn't answer at once.

"'Yes,' he said at last.

"'Oh, Robert, how could you?' I cried.

"He paused again before he said anything. I was wretched. I think I
began to cry.

"'If anyone should ask you anything, you never saw me with the money.
You never knew that I had any.'

"'How can you think I'd betray you?' I cried.

"'And the trousers. Maman couldn't get the stains out. She's thrown them
away.'

"I suddenly remembered that I'd smelt something burning that afternoon
while Robert was playing and I was sitting with him. I got up to see
what it was.

"'Stay here,' he said.

"'But something's burning in the kitchen,' I said.

"'Maman's probably burning old rags. She's in a dirty temper to-day,
she'll bite your head off if you go and interfere with her.'

"I knew now that it wasn't old rags she was burning; she hadn't thrown
the trousers away, she'd burnt them. I began to be horribly frightened,
but I didn't say anything. He took my hand.

"'If anyone should ask you about them,' he said, 'you must say that I
got them so dirty cleaning a car that they had to be given away. My
mother gave them to a tramp the day before yesterday Will you swear to
that?'

"'Yes,' I said, but I could hardly speak.

"Then he said a terrifying thing.

"'It may be that my head depends on it.'

"I was too stunned, I was too horrified, to say anything. My head began
to ache so that I thought it would burst. I don't think I closed my eyes
all night. Robert slept fitfully. He was restless even in his sleep and
turned from side to side. We went downstairs early, but my mother-in-law
was already in the kitchen. As a rule she was very decently dressed and
when she went out she looked quite smart. She was a doctor's widow and
the daughter of a staff officer; she had a feeling about her position
and she would let no one know to what economies she was reduced to make
the show she did when she went to pay visits on old army friends. Then,
with her waved hair and her manicured hands, with rouge on her cheeks,
she didn't look more than forty; but now, her hair tousled, without any
make-up, in a dressing-gown, she looked like an old procuress who'd
retired to live on her savings. She didn't say good-morning to Robert.
Without a word she handed him the paper. I watched him while he read it
and I saw his expression change. He felt my eyes upon him and looked up.
He smiled.

"'Well, little one,' he said gaily, 'what about this coffee? Are you
going to stand there all the morning looking at your lord and master or
are you going to wait on him?'

"I knew there was something In the paper that would tell me what I had
to know. Robert finished his breakfast and went upstairs to dress. When
he came down again, ready to go out, I had a shock, for he was wearing
the light grey suit that he had worn two days before, and the trousers
that went with it. But then of course I remembered that he'd had a
second pair made when he ordered the suit. There had been a lot of
discussion about it. Madame Berger had grumbled at the expense, but he
had insisted that he couldn't hope to get a job unless he was decently
dressed and at last she gave in as she always did; but she insisted that
he should have a second pair of trousers, she said it was always the
trousers that grew shabby first and it would be an economy in the end if
he had two pairs. Robert went out and said he wouldn't be in to lunch.
My mother-in-law went out soon afterwards to do her marketing and the
moment I was alone I seized the paper. I saw that an English bookmaker,
called Teddie Jordan, had been found dead in his flat. He had been
stabbed in the back. I had often heard Robert speak of him. I knew it
was he who had killed him. I had such a sudden pain in my heart that I
thought I should die. I was terrified. I don't know how long I sat
there. I couldn't move. At last I heard a key in the door and I knew it
was Madame Berger coming in again. I put the paper back where she'd left
it and went on with my work."

Lydia gave a deep sigh. They had not got to the restaurant till one or
after and it was two by the time they finished supper. When they came
in, the tables were full and there was a dense crowd at the bar. Lydia
had been talking a long time and little by little people had been going.
The crowd round the bar thinned out. There were only two persons sitting
at it now and only one table besides theirs was occupied. The waiters
were getting restive.

"I think we ought to be going," said Charley. "I'm sure they want to be
rid of us."

At that moment the people at the other table got up to go. The woman who
brought their coats from the cloak-room brought Charley's too and put it
on the table beside him. He called for the bill.

"I suppose there's some place we could go to now?"

"We could go to Montmartre. Graaf's is open all night. I'm terribly
tired."

"Well, if you like I'll drive you home."

"To Alexey and Evgenia's? I can't go there to-night. He'll be drunk.
He'll spend the whole night abusing Evgenia for bringing up the children
to be what they are and weeping over his own sorrows. I won't go to the
Srail. We'd better go to Graaf's. At least it's warm there."

She seemed so woebegone, and really so exhausted, that Charley with
hesitation made a proposal. He remembered that Simon had told him that
he could take anyone into the hotel.

"Look here, I've got two beds in my room. Why don't you come back with
me there?"

She gave him a suspicious look, but he shook his head smiling.

"Just to sleep, I mean," he added. "You know, I've had a journey to-day
and what with the excitement and one thing and another I'm pretty well
all in."

"All right."

There was no cab to be found when they got out into the street, but it
was only a little way to the hotel and they walked. A sleepy night
watchman opened the door for them and took them upstairs in the lift.
Lydia took off her hat. She had a broad, white brow. He had not seen her
hair before. It was short, curling round the neck, and pale brown. She
kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her dress. When Charley came
back from the bathroom, having got into his pyjamas, she was not only in
bed but asleep. He got into his own bed and put out the light. They had
not exchanged a word since they left the restaurant.

Thus did Charley spend his first night in Paris.




                               CHAPTER IV


It was late when he woke. For a moment he had no notion where he was.
Then he saw Lydia. They had not drawn the curtains and a grey light
filtered through the shutters. The room with its pitch-pine furniture
looked squalid. She lay on her back in the twin bed with her eyes open,
staring up at the dingy ceiling. Charley glanced at his watch. He felt
shy of the strange woman in the next bed.

"It's nearly twelve," he said. "We'd better just have a cup of coffee
and then I'll take you to lunch somewhere if you like."

She looked at him with grave, but not unkindly, eyes.

"I've been watching you sleep. You were sleeping as peacefully, as
profoundly, as a child. You had such a look of innocence on your face,
it was shattering."

"My face badly needs a shave," said he.

He telephoned down to the office for coffee and it was brought by a
stout, middle-aged maid, who gave Lydia a glance, but whose expression
heavily conveyed nothing. Charley smoked a pipe and Lydia one cigarette
after another. They talked little. Charley did not know how to deal with
the singular situation in which he found himself and Lydia seemed lost
in thoughts unconcerned with him. Presently he went into the bathroom to
shave and bath. When he came back he found Lydia sitting in an arm-chair
at the window in his dressing-gown. The window looked into the courtyard
and all there was to see was the windows, storey above storey, of the
rooms opposite. On the grey Christmas morning it looked incredibly
cheerless. She turned to him.

"Couldn't we lunch here instead of going out?"

"Downstairs, d'you mean? If you like. I don't know what the food's
like."

"The food doesn't matter. No, up here, in the room. It's so wonderful to
shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You
would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and
yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by."

"If you like I'll order your lunch here and I'll go out."

Her eyes lingered on him and there was a slightly ironic smile in them.

"I don't mind you. I think probably you're very sweet and nice. I'd
rather you stayed; there's something cosy about you that I find
comforting."

Charley was not a youth who thought very much about himself, but at that
moment he could not help a slight sense of irritation because really she
seemed to be using him with more unconcern than was reasonable. But he
had naturally good manners and did not betray his feeling. Besides, the
situation was odd, and though it was not to find himself in such a one
that he had come to Paris, it could not be denied that the experience
was interesting. He looked round the room. The beds were unmade; Lydia's
hat, her coat and skirt, her shoes and stockings were lying about,
mostly on the floor, his own clothes were piled up untidily on a chair.

"The place looks terribly frowsy," he said. "D'you think it would be
very nice to lunch in all this mess?"

"What does it matter?" she answered, with the first laugh he had heard
from her. "But if it upsets your prim English sense of decorum, I'll
make the beds, or the maid can while I'm having a bath."

She went into the bathroom and Charley telephoned for a waiter. He
ordered some eggs, some meat, cheese and fruit, and a bottle of wine.
Then he got hold of the maid. Though the room was heated there was a
fireplace, and he thought a fire would be cheerful. While the maid was
getting the logs he dressed himself, and then, when she got busy setting
things to rights, he sat down and looked at the grim courtyard. He
thought disconsolately of the jolly party at the Terry-Masons'. They
would be having a glass of sherry now before sitting down to their
Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding, and they would all be very
gay, pleased with their Christmas presents, noisy and jolly. After a
while Lydia came back. She had no make-up on her face, but she had
combed her hair neatly, the swelling of her eyelids had gone down, and
she looked young and pretty; but her prettiness was not the sort that
excites carnal desires and Charley, though naturally susceptible, saw
her come in without a flutter of his pulse.

"Oh, you've dressed," she said. "Then I can keep on your dressing-gown,
can't I? Let me have your slippers. I shall float about in them, but it
doesn't matter."

The dressing-gown had been a birthday present from his mother, and it
was of blue patterned silk; it was much too long for her, but she
arranged herself in it so that it was not unbecoming. She was glad to
see the fire and she sat down in the chair he had drawn up for her. She
smoked a cigarette. What seemed to him strange was that she took the
situation as though there were nothing strange in it. She was as casual
in her behaviour as though she had known him all her life; if anything
more was needed to banish any ideas he might have cherished about her,
nothing could have been more efficacious than the impression he so
clearly got from her that she had put out of her mind for good and all
the possibility of his wanting to go to bed with her. He was surprised
to see with what good appetite she ate. He had a notion after what she
had told him the night before that she was too distraught to eat but
sparingly, and it was a shock to his romantic sensibility to see that
she ate as much as he did and with obvious satisfaction.

They were drinking their coffee when the telephone rang. It was Simon.

"Charley? Would you like to come round and have a talk?"

"I'm afraid I can't just now."

"Why not?" Simon asked sharply.

It was characteristic of him to think that everyone should be ready to
drop whatever he was doing if he wanted him. However little something
mattered to him, if he had a whim for it and he was crossed, it
immediately assumed consequence.

"Lydia's here."

"Who the devil's Lydia?"

Charley hesitated an instant.

"Well, Princess Olga."

There was a pause and then Simon burst into a harsh laugh.

"Congratulations, old boy. I knew you'd click. Well, when you have a
moment to spare for an old friend, let me know."

He rang off. When Charley turned back to Lydia she was staring into the
fire. Her impassive face gave no sign that she had heard the
conversation. Charley pushed back the little table at which they had
lunched and made himself as comfortable as he could in a shallow
arm-chair. Lydia leaned over and put another log on the fire. There was
a sort of intimacy in the action that did not displease Charley. She was
settling herself down as a small dog turns round two or three times on a
cushion and having made a suitable hollow curls up in it. They stayed in
all the afternoon. The joyless light of the winter day gradually failed
and they sat by the light of the wood fire. In the rooms on the opposite
side of the court lights were turned on here and there, and the pale,
uncurtained windows had a false, strange look like lighted windows in
the stage-set of a street. But they were not more unreal than the
position in which he found himself seemed to Charley, sitting in that
sordid bedroom, by the fitful blazing of the log fire, while that woman
whom he did not know told him her terrible story. It seemed not to occur
to her that he might be unwilling to listen. So far as he could tell she
had no inkling that he might have anything else to do, nor that in
baring her heart to him, in telling him her anguish, she was putting a
burden on him that a stranger had no right to exact. Was it that she
wanted his sympathy? He wasn't even sure of that. She knew nothing about
him and wanted to know nothing. He was only a convenience, and but for
his sense of humour he would have found her indifference exasperating.
Toward evening she fell silent, and presently by her quiet breathing
Charley knew she had fallen asleep. He got up from his chair, for he had
sat in it so long that his limbs ached, and went to the window, on
tiptoe so as not to wake her, and sitting down on a stool looked out
into the courtyard. Now and again he saw someone pass behind the lighted
windows; he saw an elderly woman watering a flower-pot; he saw a man in
his shirt-sleeves lying on his bed reading; he wondered who and what
these people were. They looked like ordinary middle-class persons in
modest circumstances, for, after all, the hotel was cheap and the
quarter dowdy; but seen like that, through the windows, as though in a
peep-show, they looked strangely unreal. Who could tell what people were
really and what grim passions, what crimes, their commonplace aspect
concealed? In some of the rooms the curtains were drawn and only a chink
of light between them showed that there was anyone there. Some of the
windows were black; they were not empty, for the hotel was full, but
their occupants were out. On what mysterious errands? Charley's nerves
were shaken and he had a sudden feeling of horror for all those unknown
persons whose lives were so strange to him; below the smooth surface he
seemed to sense something confused, dark, monstrous and terrible.

He pondered, his brow knit in concentration, the long, unhappy story to
which he had listened all the afternoon. Lydia had gone back and forth,
now telling him of her struggle to live when she was working for a
pittance at a dressmaker's and after that some incident of her
poverty-stricken childhood in London; then more of those agonising days
that followed the murder, the terror of the arrest and the anguish of
the trial. He had read detective stories, he had read the papers, he
knew that crimes were committed, he knew that people lived in penury,
but he had known it all, as it were, from the outside; it gave him a
strange, a frightening sensation to find himself thrown into personal
contact with someone to whom horrible things had actually happened. He
remembered suddenly, he did not know why, a picture of Manet's of
somebody's execution--was it Maximilian's?--by a shooting squad. He had
always thought it a striking picture. Now it came to him as a shock to
realise that it portrayed an incident that had occurred. The Emperor had
in fact stood in that place, and as the soldiers levelled their rifles
it must have seemed incredible to him that he should stand there and in
a moment cease to live.

And now that he knew Lydia, now that he had listened to her last night
and that day, now that he had eaten with her, and danced with her, now
that for so many hours they had lived together in such close proximity,
it seemed unbelievable that such things should have befallen her.

If ever anything looked like pure chance it was that Lydia and Robert
Berger met at all. Through the friends she lived with, who worked in a
Russian restaurant, Lydia sometimes got a ticket for a concert, and when
she couldn't and there was something she very much wanted to hear, she
scraped together out of her weekly earnings enough to buy herself
standing-room. This was her only extravagance and to go to a concert her
only recreation. It was chiefly Russian music she liked. Listening to
that, she felt that somehow she was getting to the heart of the country
she had never seen, but which drew her with a yearning that must ever
remain unsatisfied. She knew nothing of Russia but what she had heard
from the lips of her father and mother, from the conversations between
Evgenia and Alexey when they talked of old times, and from the novels
she had read. It was when she was listening to the music of
Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov, to the racy and mordant compositions of
Stravinsky, that the impressions she had thus gained gathered form and
substance. Those wild melodies, those halting rhythms, in which there
was something so alien from Europe, took her out of herself and her
sordid existence and overwhelmed her with such a passion of love that
happy, releasing tears flowed down her cheeks. But because nothing of
what she saw with the mind's eye had she seen with a bodily eye, because
it was a product of hearsay and a fevered imagination, she saw it in a
strangely distorted fashion; she saw the Kremlin, with its gilt and
star-sprinkled domes, the Red Square and the Kitai Gorod, as though they
were the setting of a fairy-tale; for her, Prince Andrey and the
charming Natasha still went their errands in the busy streets of Moscow,
Dmitri Karamazov, after a wild night with the gipsies, still met the
sweet Alyosha on the Mostbaretsk Bridge, the merchant Rogozhin dashed
past in his sled with Nastasya Filippovna by his side, and the wan
characters of Chekov's stories drifted hither and yon at the breath of
circumstance like dead leaves before the wind; the Summer Garden and the
Nevsky Prospekt were magic names, and Anna Karenina still drove in her
carriage, Vronsky elegant in his new uniform climbed the stairs of the
great houses on the Fontanka Canal, and the misbegotten Raskolnikov
walked the Liteiny. In the passion and nostalgia of that music, with
Turgeniev at the back of her mind, she saw the spacious, dilapidated
country houses where they talked through the scented night, and the
marshes, pale in the windless dawn, where they shot the wild duck; with
Gorki, the wretched villages where they drank furiously, loved brutally
and killed; the turbid flow of the Volga, the interminable steppes of
the Caucasus, and the enchanting garish Crimea. Filled with longing,
filled with regret for a life that had passed for ever, homesick for a
home she had never known, a stranger in a hostile world, she felt at
that moment one with the great, mysterious country. Even though she
spoke its language haltingly, she was Russian, and she loved her native
land; at such moments she felt that there was where after all she
belonged and she understood how it was that her father, despite the
warnings, was obliged, even at the risk of death, to return to it.

It was at a concert, one where all the music was Russian, that she found
herself standing next to a young man who, she noticed, now and then
looked at her curiously. Once she happened to turn her eyes on him and
was struck by the passionate absorption with which he seemed to be
listening; his hands were clasped and his mouth slightly open as though
he were out of breath. He was rapt in ecstasy. He had clean-cut features
and looked well-bred. Lydia gave him but a passing glance and once more
returned to the music and the crowding dreams it awoke in her. She too
was carried away and she was hardly aware that a little sob broke from
her lips. She was startled when she felt a small, soft hand take hers
and give it a slight pressure. She quickly drew her hand away. The piece
was the last before the interval and when it ended the young man turned
to her. He had lovely eyes, grey under bushy eyebrows, and they were
peculiarly gentle.

"You're crying, Mademoiselle."

She had thought he might be Russian like herself, but his accent was
purely French. She understood that that quick pressure of her hand was
one of instinctive sympathy, and was touched by it.

"Not because I am unhappy," she answered, with a faint smile.

He smiled back and his smile was charming.

"I know. This Russian music, it's strangely thrilling and yet it tears
one's heart to pieces."

"But you're French. What can it mean to you?"

"Yes. I'm French. I don't know what it means to me. It's the only music
I want to listen to. It is power and passion, blood and destruction. It
makes every nerve in my body tingle." He gave a little laugh at himself.
"Sometimes when I listen to it I feel there is nothing that man is
capable of that I cannot do."

She did not answer. It was singular that the same music could say such
different things to different people. To her the music they had just
heard spoke of the tragedy of human destiny, the futility of striving
against fate, and the joy, the peace of humility and resignation.

"Are you coming to next week's concert?" he asked then. "That's to be
all Russian too."

"I don't think so."

"Why not?"

He was very young, he could be no older than herself, and there was an
ingenuousness in him that made it impossible for her to answer too
stiffly a question which in a stranger was indiscreet. There was
something in his manner that made her sure he was not trying to pick her
up. She smiled.

"I'm not a millionaire. They're rare now, you know, the Russians who
are."

"I know some of the people who are running these concerts. I have a pass
that admits two. If you'd like to meet me next Sunday in the doorway,
you can come in on it."

"I don't think I could quite do that."

"Do you think it would be compromising?" he smiled. "The crowd would
surely be a sufficient chaperon."

"I work in a dressmaker's shop. It would be hard to compromise me. I
don't know that I can put myself under an obligation to a total
stranger."

"I am sure you are a very well-brought-up young lady, but you should not
have unreasonable prejudices."

She did not want to argue the point.

"Well, we'll see. In any case I thank you for the suggestion."

They talked of other things till the conductor once more raised his
baton. At the end of the concert he turned to say good-bye to her.

"Till next Sunday, then?" he said.

"We'll see. Don't wait for me."

They lost one another in the crowd that thronged towards the exits.
During the next week she thought from time to time of the good-looking
young man with the large grey eyes. She thought of him with pleasure.
She had not arrived at her age without having had to resist now and then
the advances of men. Both Alexey and his son the gigolo had made a pass
at her, but she had not found it difficult to deal with them. A smart
box on the ear had made the lachrymose drunkard understand that there
was nothing doing, and the boy she had kept quiet by a judicious
mingling of ridicule and plain speech. Often enough men had tried to
pick her up in the street, but she was always too tired and often too
hungry to be tempted by their advances; it caused her a grim amusement
to reflect that the offer of a square meal would have tempted her much
more than the offer of a loving heart. She had felt, with her woman's
instinct, that the young man of the concert was not quite like that.
Doubtless, like any other youth of his age, he would not miss an
opportunity for a bit of fun if he could get it, but it was not for the
sake of that that he had offered to take her to the concert on Sunday.
She had no intention of going, but she was touched that he had asked
her. There was something very nice about him, something ingenuous and
frank. She felt that she could trust him. She looked at the programme.
They were giving the _Symphonie Pathtique_--she didn't much care about
that, Tchaikovsky was too Europeanised for her taste; but they were
giving also the _Sacre du Printemps_ and Borodin's String Quartet. She
wondered whether the young man had really meant what he said. It might
very well be that his invitation had been issued on the spur of the
moment and in half an hour completely forgotten. When Sunday came she
had half a mind to go and see, she did very much want to hear the
concert, and she had not a penny more in her pocket than she needed for
her Metro and her lunches during the week--she had had to give
everything else to Evgenia to provide the household with food; if he was
not there no harm would have been done, and if he was and really had a
pass for two, well, it would cost him nothing and committed her to
nothing.

Finally an impulse took her to the Salle Pleyel and there he was, where
he had said he would be, waiting for her. His eyes lit up and he took
her warmly by the hand as though they were old friends.

"I'm so glad you've come," he said. "I've been waiting for twenty
minutes. I was so afraid I'd miss you."

She blushed and smiled. They went into the concert room and she found he
had seats in the fifth row.

"Did you get these given you?" she asked with surprise.

"No, I bought them. I thought it would be nice to be comfortable."

"What folly! I'm so used to standing."

But she was flattered by his generosity and when presently he took her
hand did not withdraw it. She felt that if it gave him pleasure to hold
it, it did her no harm, and she owed him that. During the interval he
told her his name, Robert Berger, and she told him hers. He added that
he lived with his mother at Neuilly and that he worked in a broker's
office. He talked in an educated way, with a boyish enthusiasm that made
her laugh, and there was an animation about him that Lydia could not but
feel attractive. His shining eyes, the mobility of his face, suggested
an ardent nature. To sit next to him was like sitting in front of a
fire; his youth glowed with a physical warmth. When the concert was over
they walked along the Champs-lyses together and then he asked her if
she would like some tea. He would not let her refuse. It was a luxury
Lydia had never known to sit in a smart tea-shop among well-dressed
people, and the appetising smell of cakes, the heady smell of women's
perfume, the warmth, the comfortable chairs, the noisy talk, went to her
head. They sat there for an hour. Lydia told him about herself, what her
father had been and what had happened to him, how she lived now and how
she earned her living; he listened as eagerly as he talked. His grey
eyes were tender with sympathy. When it was time for her to go he asked
her whether she would come to a cinema one evening. She shook her head.

"Why not?"

"You are a rich young man, and..."

"Oh no, I'm not. Far from it. My mother has little more than her pension
and I have only the little I make."

"Then you shouldn't have tea at expensive tea-rooms. Anyhow I am a poor
working girl. Thank you for all your kindness to me, but I am not a
fool; you have been sweet to me, I don't think it would be very nice of
me to accept more of your kindness when I can make no return for it."

"But I don't want a return. I like you. I like to be with you. Last
Sunday, when you were crying, you looked so touching, it broke my heart.
You're alone in the world, and I--I'm alone too in my way. I was hoping
we could be friends."

She looked at him coolly for a moment. They were the same age, but of
course really she was years older than he; his mien was so candid she
had no doubt that he believed what he said, but she was wise enough to
know that he was talking nonsense.

"Let me be quite frank with you," she said. "I know I'm not a raving
beauty, but after all I'm young and there are people who think me
prettyish, people who like the Russian type; it's asking too much of me
to believe that you are seeking my society just for the pleasure of my
conversation. I've never been to bed with a man. I don't think it would
be very honest of me if I let you go on wasting your time and your money
on me when I have no intention of going to bed with you."

"That is frank enough in all conscience," he smiled, oh, so charmingly,
"but you see, I knew that. I haven't lived in Paris all my life without
learning something. I know instinctively whether a girl is ready for a
little fun or if she isn't. I saw at once that you were good. If I held
your hand at the concert it was because you were feeling the music as
deeply as I was, and the touch of your hand--I hardly know how to
explain it--I felt that your emotion flowed into me and gave mine a
richer intensity. Anyhow there was in my feeling nothing of desire."

"And yet we were feeling very different things," she said thoughtfully.
"Once I looked at your face and I was startled by its expression. It was
cruel and ruthless. It was not like a human face any more, it was a mask
of triumphant malice. It frightened me."

He laughed gaily and his laugh was so young, so musical and care-free,
the look of his eyes so tenderly frank, it was impossible to believe
that for a moment under the influence of that emotional music his
features had borne an expression of such cold ferocity.

"What fancies you have! You don't think I am a white-slaver, like at the
cinema, and that I am trying to get you into my clutches and shall then
ship you out to Buenos Aires?"

"No," she smiled, "I don't think that."

"How can it hurt you to come to the pictures with me? You've made the
position quite clear and I accept it."

She laughed now. It was absurd to make so much fuss. She had little
enough amusement in her life, and if he liked to give her a treat and
was content merely to sit beside her and to talk, she would be a fool to
forgo it. After all, she was nothing. She need answer for her actions to
nobody. She could take care of herself and she had given him full
warning.

"Oh, very well," she said.

They went to the pictures several times and after the show Robert
accompanied Lydia to whichever was the nearest station for her to get a
train home. During the little walk he took her arm and for a part of the
performance he held her hand, once or twice when they parted he kissed
her lightly on both cheeks, but these were the only familiarities he
permitted himself. He was good company. He had a chaffing, ironic way of
talking about things that pleased her. He did not pretend to have read
very much, he had no time, he said, and life was more entertaining than
books, but he was not stupid and he could speak intelligently of such
books as he had read. It interested Lydia to discover that he had a
peculiar admiration for Andr Gide. He was an enthusiastic tennis player
and he told her that at one time he had been encouraged to take it
seriously; people of importance in the game, thinking he had the making
of a champion, had interested themselves in him. But nothing came of it.

"One needs more money and more time to get into the first rank than I
could dispose of," he said.

Lydia had a notion that he was in love with her, but she would not allow
herself to be certain of it, for she could not but fear that her own
feelings made her no safe judge of his. He occupied her thoughts more
and more. He was the first friend of her own age that she had ever had.
She owed him happy hours at the concerts he took her to on Sunday
afternoons, and happy evenings at the cinema. He gave her life an
interest and excitement it had never had before. For him she took pains
to dress more prettily. She had never been in the habit of making-up,
but on the fourth or fifth time she met him she rouged her cheeks a
little and made up her eyes.

"What have you done to yourself?" he said, when they got into the light.
"Why have you been putting all that stuff on your face?"

She laughed and blushed under her rouge.

"I wanted to be a little more of a credit to you. I couldn't bear that
people should think you were with a little kitchen-maid who'd just come
up to Paris from her native province."

"But almost the first thing I liked in you was that you were so natural.
One gets so tired of all these painted faces. I don't know why, I found
it touching that you had nothing on your pale cheeks, nothing on your
lips, nothing on your eyebrows. It was refreshing, like a little wood
that you come into after you've been walking in the glare of the road.
Having no make-up on gives you a look of candour and one feels it is a
true expression of the uprightness of your soul."

Her heart began to beat almost painfully, but it was that curious sort
of pain which is more blissful than pleasure.

"Well, if you don't like it, I'll not do it again. After all, I only did
it for your sake."

She looked with an inattentive mind at the picture he had brought her to
see. She had mistrusted the tenderness in his musical voice, the smiling
softness of his eyes, but after this it was almost impossible not to
believe that he loved her. She had been exercising all the self-control
she possessed to prevent herself from falling in love with him. She had
kept on saying to herself that it was only a passing fancy on his part
and that it would be madness if she let her feelings run away with her.
She was determined not to become his mistress. She had seen too much of
that sort of thing among the Russians, the daughters of refugees who had
so much difficulty in making any sort of a living; often enough, because
they were bored, because they were sick of grinding poverty, they
entered upon an affair, but it never lasted; they seemed to have no
capacity for holding a man, at least not the Frenchmen whom they
generally fell for; their lovers grew tired of them, or impatient, and
chucked them; then they were even worse off than they had been before,
and often nothing remained but the brothel. But what else was there that
she could hope for? She knew very well he had no thought of marriage.
The possibility of such a thing would never have crossed his head. She
knew French ideas. His mother would not consent to his marrying a
Russian sewing-woman, which was all she was really, without a penny to
bless herself with. Marriage in France was a serious thing; the position
of the respective families must be on a par and the bride had to bring a
dowry conformable with the bridegroom's situation. It was true that her
father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university,
but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with
princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual
labour. Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable.
People were sick of them. Lydia's mother, whose grandfather had been a
serf, was herself hardly more than a peasant, and the professor had
married her in accordance with his liberal principles; but she was a
pious woman and Lydia had been brought up with strict principles. It was
in vain that she reasoned with herself; it was true that the world was
different now and one must move with the times: she could not help it,
she had an instinctive horror of becoming a man's mistress. And yet. And
yet. What else was there to look forward to? Wasn't she a fool to miss
the opportunity that presented itself? She knew that her prettiness was
only the prettiness of youth, in a few years she would be drab and
plain; perhaps she would never have another chance. Why shouldn't she
let herself go? Only a little relaxation of her self-control and she
would love him madly, it would be a relief not to keep that constant
rein on her feelings, and he loved her, yes, he loved her, she knew it,
the fire of his passion was so hot it made her gasp, in the eagerness of
his mobile face she read his fierce desire to possess her; it would be
heavenly to be loved by someone she loved to desperation, and if it
didn't last, and of course it couldn't, she would have had the ecstasy
of it, she would have the recollection, and wouldn't that be worth all
the anguish, the bitter anguish she must suffer when he left her? When
all was said and done, if it was intolerable there was always the Seine
or the gas oven.

But the curious, the inexplicable, thing was that he didn't seem to want
her to be his mistress. He used her with a consideration that was full
of respect. He could not have behaved differently if she had been a
young girl in the circle of his family acquaintance whose situation and
fortune made it reasonable to suppose that their friendship would
eventuate in a marriage satisfactory to all parties. She could not
understand it. She knew that the notion was absurd, but in her bones she
had a queer inkling that he wished to marry her. She was touched and
flattered. If it was true he was one in a thousand, but she almost hoped
it wasn't, for she couldn't bear that he should suffer the pain that
such a wish must necessarily bring him; whatever crazy ideas he
harboured, there was his mother in the background, the sensible,
practical, middle-class Frenchwoman, who would never let him jeopardise
his future and to whom he was devoted as only a Frenchman can be to his
mother.

But one evening, after the cinema, when they were walking to the Metro
station he said to her:

"There's no concert next Sunday. Will you come and have tea at home?
I've talked about you so much to my mother that she'd like to make your
acquaintance."

Lydia's heart stood still. She realised the situation at once. Madame
Berger was getting anxious about this friendship that her son had
formed, and she wanted to see her, the better to put an end to it.

"My poor Robert, I don't think your mother would like me at all. I think
it's much wiser we shouldn't meet."

"You're quite wrong. She has a great sympathy for you. The poor woman
loves me, you know, I'm all she has in the world, and it makes her happy
to think that I've made friends with a young girl who is well brought up
and respectable."

Lydia smiled. How little he knew women if he imagined that a loving
mother could feel kindly toward a girl that her son had casually picked
up at a concert! But he pressed her so strongly to accept the
invitation, which he said he issued on his mother's behalf, that at last
she did. She thought indeed that it would only make Madame Berger look
upon her with increased suspicion if she refused to meet her. They
arranged that he should pick her up at the Porte St. Denis at four on
the following Sunday and take her to his mother's. He drove up in a car.

"What luxury!" said Lydia, as she stepped in.

"It's not mine, you know. I borrowed it from a friend."

Lydia was nervous of the ordeal before her and not even Robert's
affectionate friendliness sufficed to give her confidence.

They drove to Neuilly.

"We'll leave the car here," said Robert, drawing up to the kerb in a
quiet street. "I don't want to leave it outside our house. It wouldn't
do for the neighbours to think I had a car and of course I can't explain
that it's only lent."

They walked a little.

"Here we are."

It was a tiny detached villa, rather shabby from want of paint and
smaller than, from the way Robert had talked, she expected. He took her
into the drawing-room. It was a small room crowded with furniture and
ornaments, with oil-pictures in gold frames on the walls, and opened by
an archway on to the dining-room, in which the table was set for tea.
Madame Berger put down the novel she was reading and came forward to
greet her guest. Lydia had pictured her as a rather stout, short woman
in widow's weeds, with a mild face and the homely, respectable air of a
person who has given up all thought of earthly vanity; she was not at
all like that; she was thin, and in her high-heeled shoes as tall as
Robert; she was smartly dressed in black flowered silk and she wore a
string of false pearls round her neck; her hair, permanently waved, was
very dark brown and though she must have been hard on fifty there was
not a white streak in it. Her sallow skin was somewhat heavily powdered.
She had fine eyes, Robert's delicate, straight nose, and the same thin
lips, but, in her, age had given them a certain hardness. She was in her
way and for her time of life a good-looking woman, and she evidently
took pains over her appearance, but there was in her expression nothing
of the charm that made Robert so attractive. Her eyes, so bright and
dark, were cool and watchful. Lydia felt the sharp, scrutinising look
with which Madame Berger took her in from head to foot as she entered
the room, but it was immediately superseded by a cordial and welcoming
smile. She thanked Lydia effusively for coming so long a distance to see
her.

"You must understand how much I wanted to see a young girl of whom my
son has talked to me so much. I was prepared for a disagreeable
surprise. I have, to tell you the truth, no great confidence in my son's
judgment. It is a relief to me to see that you are as nice as he told me
you were."

All this she said with a good deal of facial expression, with smiles and
little nods of the head, flatteringly, in the manner of a hostess
accustomed to society trying to set a stranger at her ease. Lydia,
watchful too, answered with becoming diffidence. Madame Berger gave an
emphatic, slightly forced laugh and made an enthusiastic little gesture.

"But you are charming. I'm not surprised that this son of mine should
neglect his old mother for your sake."

Tea was brought in by a stolid-looking young maid whom Madame Berger,
while continuing her gesticulative, complimentary remarks, watched with
sharp, anxious eyes, so that Lydia guessed that a tea party was an
unusual event in the house and the hostess not quite sure that the
servant knew how to set about things. They went into the dining-room and
sat down. There was a small grand piano in it.

"It takes up room," said Madame Berger, "but my son is passionately
devoted to music. He plays for hours at a time. He tells me that you are
a musician of the first class."

"He exaggerates. I'm very fond of it, but very ignorant."

"You are too modest, Mademoiselle."

There was a dish of little cakes from the confectioner's and a dish of
sandwiches. Under each plate was a doily and on each a tiny napkin.
Madame Berger had evidently taken pains to do things in a modish way.
With a smile in her cold eyes she asked Lydia how she would like her
tea.

"You Russians always take lemon, I know, and I got a lemon for you
specially. Will you begin with a sandwich?"

The tea tasted of straw.

"I know you Russians smoke all through your meals. Please do not stand
on any ceremony with me. Robert, where are the cigarettes?"

Madame Berger pressed sandwiches on Lydia, she pressed cakes; she was
one of those hostesses who look upon it as a mark of hospitality to make
their guests eat however unwilling they may be. She talked without
ceasing, well, in a high-pitched, metallic voice, smiling a great deal,
and her politeness was effusive. She asked Lydia a great many questions,
which had a casual air so that on the face of it they looked like the
civil inquiries a woman of the world would put out of sympathy for a
friendless girl, but Lydia realised that they were cleverly designed to
find out everything she could about her. Lydia's heart sank; this was
not the sort of woman who for love of her son would allow him to do an
imprudent thing; but the certainty of this gave her back her own
assurance. It was obvious that she had nothing to lose; she certainly
had nothing to hide; and she answered the questions with frankness. She
told Madame Berger, as she had already told Robert, about her father and
mother, and what her life had been in London and how she had lived since
her mother's death. It even amused her to see behind Madame Berger's
warm sympathy, through her shocked commiserating answers, the shrewdness
that weighed every word she heard and drew conclusions upon it. After
two or three unavailing attempts to go, which Madame Berger would not
hear of, Lydia managed to tear herself away from so much friendliness.
Robert was to see her home. Madame Berger seized both her hands when she
said good-bye to her and her fine dark eyes glittered with cordiality.

"You are delicious," she said. "You know your way now, you must come and
see me often, often; you will be always sure of a hearty welcome."

When they were walking along to the car Robert took her arm with an
affectionate gesture which seemed to ask for protection rather than to
offer it and which charmed her.

"Well, my dear one, it went off very well. My mother liked you. You made
a conquest of her at once. She'll adore you."

Lydia laughed.

"Don't be so silly. She detested me."

"No, no, you're wrong. I promise you. I know her, I saw at once that she
took to you."

Lydia shrugged her shoulders, but did not answer. When they parted they
arranged to go to the cinema on the following Tuesday. She agreed to his
plan, but she was pretty sure that his mother would put a stop to it. He
knew her address now.

"If anything should happen to prevent you, you'll send me a _petit
bleu_?"

"Nothing will happen to prevent me," he said fondly.

She was very sad that evening. If she could have got by herself she
would have cried. But perhaps it was just as well that she couldn't; it
was no good making oneself bad blood. It had been a foolish dream. She
would get over her unhappiness; after all, she was used to it. It would
have been much worse if he had been her lover and thrown her over.

Monday passed, Tuesday came; but no _petit bleu_. She was certain that
it would be there when she got back from work. Nothing. She had an hour
before she need think of getting ready, and she passed it waiting with
sickening anxiety for the bell to ring; she dressed with the feeling
that she was foolish to take the trouble, for the message would arrive
before she was finished. She wondered if it were possible that he would
let her go to the cinema and not turn up. It would be heartless, it
would be cruel, but she knew that he was under his mother's thumb, she
suspected he was weak, and it might be that to let her go to a
meeting-place and not come himself would seem to him the best way,
brutal though it was, to show her that he was done with her. No sooner
had this notion occurred to her than she was sure of it and she nearly
decided not to go. Nevertheless she went. After all, if he could be so
beastly it would prove that she was well rid of him.

But he was there all right and when he saw her walking along he came
towards her with the springy gait which marked his eager vitality. On
his face shone his sweet smile. His spirits seemed even higher than
usual.

"I'm not in the mood for the pictures this evening," he said. "Let us
have a drink at Fouquet's and then go for a drive. I've got a car just
round the corner."

"If you like."

It was fine and dry, though cold, and the stars in the frosty night
seemed to laugh with a good-natured malice at the gaudy lights of the
Champs-lyses. They had a glass of beer, Robert meanwhile talking
nineteen to the dozen, and then they walked up the Avenue George V to
where he had parked his car. Lydia was puzzled. He talked quite
naturally, but she had no notion what were his powers of dissimulation,
and she could not help asking herself whether he proposed the drive in
order to break unhappy news to her. He was an emotional creature,
sometimes, she had discovered, even a trifle theatrical (but that amused
rather than offended her), and she wondered whether he were setting the
stage for an affecting scene of renunciation.

"This isn't the same car that you had on Sunday," she said, when they
came to it.

"No. It belongs to a friend who wants to sell. I said I wanted to show
it to a possible purchaser."

They drove to the Arc de Triomphe and then along the Avenue Foch till
they came to the Bois. It was dark there except when they met the
head-lights of a car coming towards them, and deserted except for a car
parked here and there in which one surmised a couple was engaged in
amorous conversation. Presently Robert drew up at the kerb.

"Shall we stop here and smoke a cigarette?" he said. "You're not cold?"

"No."

It was a solitary spot and in other circumstances Lydia might have felt
a trifle nervous. But she thought she knew Robert well enough to know
that he was incapable of taking advantage of the situation. He had too
nice a nature. Moreover she had an intuition that he had something on
his mind, and was curious to know what it was. He lit her cigarette and
his and for a moment kept silent. She realised that he was embarrassed
and did not know how to begin. Her heart began to beat anxiously.

"I've got something to say to you, my dear," he said at last.

"Yes?"

"_Mon Dieu_, I hardly know how to put it. I'm not often nervous, but at
the moment I have a curious sensation that is quite new to me."

Lydia's heart sank, but she had no intention of showing that she was
suffering.

"If one has something awkward to say," she answered lightly, "it's
better to say it quite plainly, you know. One doesn't do much good by
beating about the bush."

"I'll take you at your word. Will you marry me?"

"Me?"

It was the last thing she had expected him to say.

"I love you passionately. I think I fell in love with you at first
sight, when we stood side by side at that concert, and the tears poured
down your pale cheeks."

"But your mother?"

"My mother is delighted. She's waiting now. I said that if you consented
I would take you to her. She wants to embrace you. She's happy at the
thought that I'm settling down with someone she entirely approves of,
and the idea is that after we've all had a good cry together we should
crack a bottle of champagne."

"Last Sunday when you took me to see your mother, had you told her that
you wished to marry me?"

"But of course. She very naturally wanted to see what you were like.
She's not stupid, my mother; she made up her mind at once."

"I had an idea she didn't like me."

"You were wrong."

They smiled into one another's eyes, and she raised her face to his. For
the first time he kissed her on the lips.

"There's no doubt," he said, "that a right-hand drive is much more
convenient for kissing a girl than a left-hand."

"You fool," she laughed.

"Then you do care for me a little?"

"I've worshipped you ever since I first saw you."

"But with the reserve of a well-brought-up young woman who will not give
free rein to her emotions until she's quite sure it's prudent?" he
answered, tenderly chaffing her.

But she answered seriously.

"I've suffered so much in my short life, I didn't want to expose myself
to a suffering perhaps greater than I could bear."

"I adore you."

She had never known such happiness; indeed, she could hardly bring
herself to believe it: at that moment her heart overflowed with
gratitude to life. She would have liked to sit there, nestling in his
arms, for ever; at that moment she would have liked to die. But she
bestirred herself.

"Let us go to your mother," she said.

She felt on a sudden warm with love for that woman who but just knew
her, and yet, contrary to all expectation, because her son loved her,
because with her sharp eyes she had seen that she deeply loved her son,
had consented, even gladly, to their marriage. Lydia did not think there
could be another woman in France who was capable of such a sacrifice.

They drove off. Robert parked the car in a street parallel to the one in
which he lived. When they reached the little house he opened the front
door with his latch-key and excitedly preceded Lydia into the
sitting-room.

"O.K., Mother."

Lydia immediately followed him in and Madame Berger, in the same black
dress of flowered silk as she had worn on Sunday, came forward and took
her in her arms.

"My dear child," she cried. "I'm so happy."

Lydia burst into tears. Madame Berger kissed her tenderly.

"There, there, there! You mustn't cry. I give you my son with all my
heart. I know you'll make him a good wife. Come, sit down. Robert will
open a bottle of champagne."

Lydia composed herself and dried her eyes.

"You are too good to me, Madame. I don't know what I've done to deserve
so much kindness."

Madame Berger took her hand and gently patted it.

"You have fallen in love with my son and he has fallen in love with
you."

Robert had gone out of the room. Lydia felt that she must at once state
the facts as they were.

"But, Madame, I don't feel sure that you realise the circumstances. The
little money that my father was able to get out of Russia went years
ago. I have nothing but what I earn. Nothing, absolutely nothing. And
only two dresses besides the one I'm wearing."

"But, my dear child, what does that matter? Oh, I don't deny it, I
should have been pleased if you had been able to bring Robert a
reasonable _dot_, but money isn't everything. Love is more important.
And nowadays what is money worth? I flatter myself that I am a good
judge of character and it didn't take me long to discover that you have
a sweet and honest nature. I saw that you had been well brought up and I
judged that you had good principles. After all, that is what one wants
in a wife, and, you know, I know my Robert, he would never have been
happy with a little French bourgeoise. He has a romantic disposition and
it says something to him that you are Russian. And it isn't as if you
were nobody; it is after all something one need not be ashamed of to be
the daughter of a professor."

Robert came in with glasses and a bottle of champagne. They sat talking
late into the night. Madame Berger had her plan cut and dried and they
could do nothing but accept it; Lydia and Robert should live in the
house while she would make herself comfortable in the little pavilion at
the back of the garden. They would have their meals in common, but
otherwise she would keep to her own quarters. She was decided that the
young couple must be left to themselves and not exposed to interference
from her.

"I don't want you to look upon me as a mother-in-law," she told Lydia.
"I want to be the mother to you that you've lost, but I also want to be
your friend."

She was anxious that the marriage should take place without delay. Lydia
had a League of Nations passport and a _Carte de Sjour_; her papers
were in order; so they had only to wait the time needed for notification
to be made at the Mairie. Since Robert was Catholic and Lydia Orthodox,
they decided, notwithstanding Madame Berger's reluctance, to waive a
religious ceremony that neither of them cared about. Lydia was too
excited and too confused to sleep that night.

The marriage took place very quietly. The only persons present were
Madame Berger and an old friend of the family, Colonel Legrand, an Army
doctor who had been a brother officer of Robert's father; Evgenia and
Alexey and their children. It took place on a Friday and since Robert
had to go to work on the Monday morning their honeymoon was brief.
Robert drove Lydia to Dieppe in a car that he had been lent and drove
her back on Sunday night.

Lydia did not know that the car, like the cars in which he had on other
occasions driven her, was not lent, but stolen; that was why he had
always parked them a street or two from that in which he lived; she did
not know that Robert had a few months before been sentenced to two
years' imprisonment with _sursis_, that is, with a suspended sentence
because it was his first conviction; she did not know that he had since
been tried on a charge of smuggling drugs and had escaped conviction by
the skin of his teeth; she did not know that Madame Berger had welcomed
the marriage because she thought it would settle Robert and that it was
indeed the only chance he had of leading an honest life.




                               CHAPTER V


Charley had no idea how long he had been sitting at the window,
absent-mindedly gazing out into the dark court, when he was called back
from the perplexed welter of his thoughts by the sound of Lydia's voice.

"I believe I've been asleep," she said.

"You certainly have."

He turned on the light, which he had not done before for fear of waking
her. The fire was almost out and he put on another log.

"I feel so refreshed. I slept without dreaming."

"D'you have bad dreams?"

"Fearful."

"If you'll dress we might go out to dinner."

There was an ironic, but not unkindly, quality in the smile she gave
him.

"I don't suppose this is the way you usually spend Christmas Day."

"I'm bound to say it isn't," he answered, with a cheerful grin.

She went into the bathroom and he heard her having a bath. She came back
still wearing his dressing-gown.

"Now if you'll go in and wash, I'll dress."

Charley left her. He accepted it as quite natural that though she had
slept all night in the next bed to his she should not care to dress in
his presence.

Lydia took him to a restaurant she knew in the Avenue du Maine where she
said the food was good. Though a trifle self-consciously old-world, with
its panelled walls, chintz curtains and pewter plates, it was a friendly
little place, and there was no one there but two middle-aged women in
collars and ties and three young Indians who ate in moody silence. You
had a feeling that, lonely and friendless, they dined there that evening
because they had no place to go.

Lydia and Charley sat in a corner where their conversation could not be
overheard. Lydia ate with hearty appetite. When he offered her a second
helping of one of the dishes they had ordered she pushed forward her
plate.

"My mother-in-law used to complain of my appetite. She used to say that
I ate as though I had never had enough in my life. Which was true, of
course."

It gave Charley a turn. It was a queer sensation to sit down to dinner
with someone who year in and year out had never had quite enough to eat.
And another thing: it disturbed his preconceived ideas to discover that
one could undergo all the misery she had undergone and yet eat
voraciously. It made her tragedy a little grotesque; she was not a
romantic figure, but just a quite ordinary young woman, and that somehow
made all that had happened to her more horrible.

"Did you get on well with your mother-in-law?" he asked.

"Yes. Reasonably. She wasn't a bad woman. She was hard, scheming,
practical and avaricious. She was a good housekeeper and she liked
everything in the house to be just so. I used to infuriate her with my
Russian sloppiness, but she had a great control over her temper and
never allowed an irritable word to escape her. After Robert, her great
passion was for respectability. She was proud of her father having been
a staff officer and her husband a colonel in the Medical Service. They
were both Officers in the Legion of Honour. Her husband had lost a leg
in the war. She was very proud of their distinguished record, and she
had a keen sense of the social importance their position gave her. I
suppose you'd say she was a snob, but in such a petty way that it didn't
offend you, it only made you laugh. She had notions of morality that
foreigners often think are unusual in France. For instance she had no
patience with women who were unfaithful to their husbands, but she
looked upon it as natural enough that men should deceive their wives.
She would never have dreamt of accepting an invitation unless she had
the power to return it. Once she'd made a bargain she'd stick to it even
though it turned out to be a bad one. Though she counted every penny she
spent she was scrupulously honest, honest by principle and honest from
loyalty to her family. She had a deep sense of justice. She knew she'd
acted dishonourably in letting me marry Robert in the dark, and should
at least have given me the chance of deciding whether, knowing all, I
would marry him or not--and of course I would never have hesitated; but
she didn't know that, and she thought that I should have good cause to
blame her when I found out and all she could answer was that where
Robert was concerned she was prepared to sacrifice anyone else; and
because of that she forced herself to be tolerant of a great deal in me
that she didn't like. She put all her determination, all her
self-control, all her tact, into the effort of making the marriage a
success. She felt it was the only chance that Robert had of reforming
and her love was so great that she was prepared to lose him to me. She
was even prepared to lose her influence over him, and that I think is
what a woman values, whether it's a son or a husband or a lover or
anything, even more than his love for her. She said that she wouldn't
interfere with us and she never did. Except in the kitchen, later on
when we gave up the maid, and at meal-times, we hardly saw her. When she
wasn't out she spent the whole time in her little pavilion at the end of
the garden, and when, thinking she was lonely, we asked her to come and
sit with us, she refused on the excuse that she had work to do, letters
to write, or a book she wanted to finish. She was a woman whom it was
difficult to love, but impossible not to respect."

"What has happened to her now?" asked Charley.

"The cost of the trial ruined her. Most of her small fortune had already
gone to keep Robert out of prison and the rest went on lawyers. She had
to sell the house which was the mainstay of her pride in her position as
an officer's widow and she had to mortgage her pension. She was always a
good cook, she's gone as general servant in the apartment of an American
who has a studio at Auteuil."

"D'you ever see her?"

"No. Why should I? We have nothing in common. Her interest in me ceased
when I could be no further use in keeping Robert straight."

Lydia went on to tell him about her married life. It was a pleasure for
her to have a house of her own and heaven not to have to go to work
every morning. She soon discovered that there was no money to waste,
but, compared with what she had been used to, the circumstances in which
she now lived were affluent. And at least she had security. Robert was
sweet to her, he was easy to live with, inclined to let her wait on him,
but she loved him so much that this was a delight to her, gay with an
impudent, happy-go-lucky cynicism that made her laugh, and brim-full of
vitality. He was generous to a fault, considering how poor they were. He
gave her a gold wrist-watch and a vanity-case that must have cost at
least a couple of thousand francs and a bag in crocodile skin. She was
surprised to find a tram ticket in one of the pockets, and when she
asked Robert how it got there, he laughed. He said he had bought the bag
off a girl who had had a bad day at the races. Her lover had only just
given it her and it was such a bargain that he had not been able to
resist buying it. Now and then he took her to the theatre and then they
went to Montmartre to dance. When she wanted to know how he had the
money for such extravagance he answered gaily that with the world full
of fools it would be absurd if a clever man couldn't get on to a good
thing now and again. But these excursions they kept secret from Madame
Berger. Lydia would have thought it impossible to love Robert more than
when she married him, but every day increased her passion. He was not
only a charming lover, but also a delightful companion.

About four months after their marriage Robert lost his job. This created
a disturbance in the household that she failed to understand, for his
salary had been negligible; but he and his mother shut themselves up in
the pavilion for a long time, and when Lydia saw her mother-in-law next
it was obvious that she had been crying. Her face was haggard and she
gave Lydia a look of sullen exasperation as though she blamed her. Lydia
could not make it out. Then the old doctor, the friend of the family,
Colonel Legrand, came and the three of them were again closeted in
Madame Berger's room. For two or three days Robert was silent and for
the first time since she had known him somewhat irritable; when she
asked him what was the matter he told her sharply not to bother. Then,
thinking perhaps that he must offer some explanation, he said the whole
trouble was that his mother was so avaricious. Lydia knew that though
she was sparing, she was never so where her son was concerned, for him
nothing was too good; but seeing that Robert was in a highly nervous
state, she felt it better to say nothing. For two or three days Madame
Berger looked dreadfully worried, but then, whatever the difficulty was,
it was settled; she dismissed, however, the maid to keep whom had been
almost a matter of principle, for so long as she had a servant Madame
Berger could look upon herself as a lady. But now she told Lydia that it
was a useless waste; the two of them could easily run the little house
between them, and doing the marketing herself she could be sure of not
being robbed; and besides, with nothing to do really, she would enjoy
cooking. Lydia was only too willing to do the housework.

Life went on pretty much as it had before. Robert quickly regained his
good-humour and was as gay, loving and delightful as he had ever been.
He got up late in the morning and went out to hunt for a job, and often
he did not come back till late in the night. Madame Berger always had a
good meal for Robert, but when the two women were alone they ate
sparingly; a bowl of thin soup, a salad and a bit of cheese. It was
plain that Madame Berger was harassed. More than once Lydia came into
the kitchen and found her standing there, doing nothing, with her face
distraught, as though an intolerable anxiety possessed her, but on
Lydia's approach she chased the expression away and busied herself with
the work upon which she was engaged. She still kept up appearances, and
on the "days" of old friends dressed herself in her best, faintly rouged
her cheeks, and sallied forth, very upright and a pattern of
middle-class respectability, to pay her visit. After a short while,
though he was still without a job, Robert seemed to have no less
spending money than he had before. He told Lydia that he had managed to
sell one or two second-hand cars on commission; and then that he had got
in with some racing men at a bar he went to and got tips from them.
Lydia did not know why a suspicion insinuated itself into her unwilling
mind that something was going on that was not above board. On one
occasion an incident occurred which troubled her. One Sunday Robert told
his mother that a man who, he hoped, was going to give him a job had
asked him to bring Lydia to lunch at his house near Chartres and he was
going to drive her down; but when they had started, picking up the car
two streets off the one in which they lived, he told Lydia that this was
an invention. He had had a bit of luck at the races on the previous
Thursday and was taking her to lunch at Jouy. He had told his mother
this story because she would look upon it as an unjustified extravagance
to go and spend money at a restaurant. It was a warm and beautiful day.
Luncheon was served in the garden and the place was crowded. They found
two seats at a table that was already occupied by a party of four. This
party were finishing their meal and left while they were but half
through theirs.

"Oh, look," said Robert, "one of those ladies has left her bag behind."

He took it and, to Lydia's surprise, opened it. She saw there was money
inside. He looked quickly right and left and then gave her a sharp,
cunning, malicious glance. Her heart stood still. She had a conviction
that he was just about to take the money out and put it in his pocket.
She gasped with horror. But at that moment one of the men who had been
at the table came back and saw Robert with the bag in his hands.

"What are you doing with that bag?" he asked.

Robert gave him his frank and charming smile.

"It was left behind. I was looking to see if I could find out to whom it
belonged."

The man looked at him with stern, suspicious eyes.

"You had only to give it to the proprietor."

"And do you think you would ever have got it back?" Robert answered
blandly, returning him the bag.

Without a word the man took it and went away.

"Women are criminally careless with their bags," said Robert.

Lydia gave a sigh of relief. Her suspicion was absurd. After all, with
people all around, no one could have the effrontery to steal money out
of a bag; the risk was too great. But she knew every expression of
Robert's face and, unbelievable as it was, she was certain that he had
intended to take it. He would have looked upon it as a capital joke.

She had resolutely put the occurrence out of her mind, but on that
dreadful morning when she read in the paper that the English bookmaker,
Teddie Jordan, had been murdered it returned to her. She remembered the
look in Robert's eyes. She had known then, in a horrible flash of
insight, that he was capable of anything. She knew now what the stain
was on his trousers. Blood! And she knew where those thousand-franc
notes had come from. She knew also why, when he had lost his job, Robert
had worn that sullen look, why his mother had been distracted and why
Colonel Legrand, the doctor, had been closeted with mother and son for
hours of agitated colloquy. Because Robert had stolen money. And if
Madame Berger had sent away the maid and since then had skimped and
saved, it was because she had had to pay a sum she could ill afford to
save him from prosecution. Lydia read once more the account of the
crime. Teddie Jordan lived alone in a ground-floor flat which the
concierge kept clean for him. He had his meals out, but the concierge
brought him his coffee every morning at nine. It was thus she had found
him. He was lying on the floor, in his shirt-sleeves, a knife-wound in
his back, near the gramophone, with a broken record under him so that it
looked as if he had been stabbed while changing it. His empty
pocket-book was on the chimney-piece. There was a half-finished whisky
and soda on a table by the side of an arm-chair, and another glass,
unused, on a tray with the bottle of whisky, a syphon and an uncut cake.
It was obvious that he had been expecting a visitor, but the visitor had
refused to drink. Death had taken place some hours before. The reporter
had apparently conducted a small investigation of his own, but how much
fact there was in what he narrated, and how much fiction, it was hard to
say. He had questioned the concierge, and from her learnt that, so far
as she knew, no women ever came to the apartment, but a certain number
of men, chiefly young, and from this she had drawn her own conclusions.
Teddie Jordan was a good tenant, gave no trouble, and when in funds was
generous. The knife had been thrust into his back with such violence
that, according to the reporter, the police were convinced that the
murderer must have been a man of powerful physique. There were no signs
of disorder in the room, which indicated that Jordan had been attacked
suddenly and had had no chance to defend himself. The knife was not
found, but stains on the window curtain showed that it had been wiped on
it. The reporter went on to say that, though the police had looked with
care, they had discovered no finger-prints; from this he concluded that
the murderer had either wiped them away or worn gloves. In the first
case it showed great coolness and in the second premeditation.

The reporter had then gone on to Jojo's Bar. This was a small bar in a
back-street behind the Boulevard de la Madeleine, frequented by jockeys,
bookmakers and betting men. You could get simple fare, bacon and eggs,
sausages and chops, and it was here that Jordan regularly had his meals.
It was here too that he did much of his business. The reporter learnt
that Jordan was popular among the bar's frequenters. He had his ups and
downs, but when he had had a good day was open-handed. He was always
ready to stand anyone a drink and was hail-fellow-well-met with
everyone. All the same he had the reputation of being a pretty wily
customer. Sometimes he was up against it and then would run up a fairly
heavy bill, but in the end he always paid up. The reporter mentioned the
concierge's suspicions to Jojo, the proprietor of the bar, but was
assured by him that there was no foundation for them. He ended his
graphic story by saying that the police were actively engaged in making
enquiries and expected to make an arrest within twenty-four hours.

Lydia was terrified. She did not doubt for a moment that Robert was
guilty of the crime; she was as sure of that as if she had seen him
commit it.

"How could he? How could he?" she cried.

But she was startled at the sound of her own voice. Even though the
kitchen was empty she must not let her thoughts find expression. Her
first, her only feeling was that he must be saved from the terrible
danger that faced him. Whatever he had done, she loved him; nothing he
could do would ever make her love him less. When it occurred to her that
they might take him from her she could have screamed with anguish. Even
at that moment she was intoxicated by the thought of his soft lips on
hers and the feel of his slim body, still a boy's body, in her arms.
They said the knife-thrust had shown great violence, and they were
looking for a big, powerful man. Robert was strong and wiry, but he was
neither big nor powerful. And then there was what the concierge
suspected. The police would hunt in the night clubs and the cafs, in
Montmartre and the Rue de Lappe, which the homosexuals frequented.
Robert never went to such places and no one knew better than she how far
he was from any abnormal inclination. It was true that he went a good
deal to Jojo's Bar, but so did many others; he went to get tips from the
jockeys and better odds from the bookmakers than he was likely to get at
the tote. It was all above board. There was no reason why suspicion
should ever fall on him. The trousers had been destroyed, and who would
ever think that Madame Berger, with her thrift, had persuaded Robert to
buy a second pair? If the police discovered that Robert knew Jordan (and
Jordan knew masses of people) and made an examination of the house (it
was unlikely, but it might be that they would make enquiries of everyone
with whom the bookmaker was known to have been friendly) they would find
nothing. Except that little packet of thousand-franc notes. At the
thought of them Lydia was panic-stricken. It would be easy to ascertain
that they had been in straitened circumstances. Robert and she had
always thought that his mother had a little hoard hidden away somewhere
in her pavilion, but that doubtless had gone at the time Robert lost his
job; if suspicion once fell on him it was inevitable that the police
should discover what the trouble had been; and how then could she
explain that she had several thousand francs? Lydia did not know how
many notes there had been in the packet. Perhaps eight or ten. It was a
substantial sum to poor people. It was a sum that Madame Berger, even
though she knew how Robert had got the notes, would never have the
courage to part with. She would trust in her own cunning to hide them
where no one would think of looking. Lydia knew it would be useless to
talk to her. No argument would move her in such a case. The only thing
was to get at them herself and burn them. She would never have a
moment's peace till then. Then the police might come and no
incriminating evidence could be discovered. With frenzied anxiety she
set her mind to think where Madame Berger would have been most likely to
put them. She did not often go into the pavilion, for Madame Berger did
the room herself, but she had in her mind's eye a pretty clear picture
of it, and in her thought now she examined minutely every piece of
furniture and every likely place of concealment. She determined to take
the first opportunity to make a search.

The opportunity presented itself sooner than she could have foreseen.
That very afternoon, after the meagre lunch which the two women had
eaten in silence, Lydia was sitting in the parlour, sewing. She could
not read, but she had to do something to calm the frightful disquietude
that gnawed at her heart-strings. She heard Madame Berger come into the
house and supposed she was going into the kitchen, but the door was
opened.

"If Robert comes back tell him I shall be in soon after five."

To Lydia's profound astonishment she saw that her mother-in-law was
dressed in all her best. She wore her black dress of flowered silk and a
black satin toque, and she had a silver fox round her neck.

"Are you going out?" Lydia cried.

"Yes, it's the last day of _la gnrale_. She would think it very
ill-mannered of me if I did not put in an appearance. Both she and the
general had a great affection for my poor husband."

Lydia understood. She saw that in view of what might happen Madame
Berger was determined that on that day of all others she must behave as
she naturally would. To omit a social duty might be ascribed to fear
that her son was implicated in the murder of the bookmaker. To fulfil
it, on the other hand, was proof that the possibility had never entered
her head. She was a woman of indomitable courage. Beside her, Lydia
could only feel herself weak and womanish.

As soon as she was gone Lydia bolted the front door, so that no one
could come in without ringing, and crossed the tiny garden. She gave it
a cursory glance; there was a patch of weedy grass surrounded by a
gravel walk, and in the middle of the grass a bed in which
chrysanthemums had been planted to flower in the autumn. She had a
conviction that her mother-in-law was more likely to have hidden the
notes in her own apartment than there. The pavilion consisted of one
largish room with a closet adjoining, which Madame Berger had made into
her dressing-room. The larger room was furnished with a highly carved
bedroom suite in mahogany, a sofa, an arm-chair and a rosewood desk. On
the walls were enlarged photographs of herself and her deceased husband,
a photograph of his grave, under which hung his medals and his Legion of
Honour, and photographs of Robert at various ages. Lydia considered
where a woman of that sort would naturally hide something. She had
doubtless a place that she always used, since for years she had had to
keep her money where Robert could not find it. She was too cunning to
choose such an obvious hiding-place as the bed, a secret drawer in the
writing-desk, or the slits in the arm-chair and the sofa. There was no
fireplace in the room, but a gas stove with an iron pipe. Lydia looked
at it. She saw no possibility of concealing anything there; besides, in
winter it was used, and Lydia thought her mother-in-law the sort of
woman who, having found a safe place, would stick to it. She stared
about her with perplexity. Because she could think of nothing better to
do she unmade the bed and took the pillow out of its slip. She looked at
it carefully and felt it over. The mattress was covered with a material
so hard that she felt sure Madame Berger could not have cut one of the
seams and re-sewn it. If she had used the same hiding-place for a long
period it must be one that she could get at conveniently and such that,
if she wanted to take money out, she could quickly efface all trace of
her action. For form's sake Lydia looked through the chest of drawers
and the writing-desk. Nothing was locked and everything was carefully
arranged. She looked into the wardrobe. Her mind had been working busily
all the time. She had heard innumerable stories of how the Russians hid
things, money and jewels, so that they might save them from the
Bolsheviks. She had heard stories of extreme ingenuity that had been of
no avail and of others in which by some miracle discovery had been
averted. She remembered one of a woman who had been searched in the
train between Moscow and Leningrad. She had been stripped to the skin,
but she had sewn a diamond necklace in the hem of her fur coat, and
though it had been carefully examined the diamonds were overlooked.
Madame Berger had a fur coat too, an old astrakhan that she had had for
years, and this was in the wardrobe. Lydia took it out and made a
thorough search, but she could neither see nor feel anything. There was
no sign of recent stitching. She replaced it and one by one took out the
three or four dresses that Madame Berger possessed. There was no
possibility that the notes could have been sewn up in any of them. Her
heart sank. She was afraid that her mother-in-law had hidden the notes
so well that she would never find them. A new idea occurred to her.
People said that the best way to hide something was in a place so
conspicuous that no one would think of looking there. A work-basket, for
instance, like the one Madame Berger had on a little table beside the
arm-chair. Somewhat despondently, with a look at her watch, for time was
passing and she could not afford to stay too long, she turned the things
in it over. There was a stocking that Madame Berger had been mending,
scissors, needles, various odds and ends, and reels of cotton and silk.
There was a half-finished tippet in black wool that Madame Berger was
making to put over her shoulders when she came from the pavilion to the
house. Among the reels of black and white cotton Lydia was surprised to
find one of yellow thread. She wondered what her mother-in-law used that
for. Her heart gave a great leap as her eyes fell on the curtains. The
only light in the room came from the glass door, and one pair hung
there; another pair served as a _portire_ for the door that led to the
dressing-room. Madame Berger was very proud of them, they had belonged
to her father the colonel and she remembered them from her childhood.
They were very rich and heavy, with a fringed and festooned pelmet, and
they were of yellow damask. Lydia went up first to those at the window
and turned back the lining. They had been made for a higher room than
that in which they now were, and since Madame Berger had not had the
heart to cut them, had been turned up at the bottom. Lydia examined the
deep hem; it had been sewn by a professional sempstress and the thread
was faded. Then she looked at the curtains on each side of the door. She
gave a deep sigh. At the corner nearest to the front wall, and so in
darkness, there was a little piece about four inches long which the
clean thread showed to have been recently stitched. Lydia got the
scissors out of the work-basket and quickly cut; she slipped her hand
through the opening and pulled out the notes. She put them in her dress
and then it did not take her more than a few minutes to get a needle and
the yellow thread and sew up the seam so that no one could tell it had
been touched. She looked round the room to see that no trace of her
interference remained. She went back to the house, upstairs into the
bathroom, and tore the notes into little pieces; she threw them into the
pan of the closet and pulled the plug. Then she went downstairs again,
drew back the bolt on the front door, and sat down once more to her
sewing. Her heart was beating so madly that she could hardly endure it;
but she was infinitely relieved. Now the police could come and they
would find nothing.

Presently Madame Berger returned. She came into the drawing-room and
sank down on a sofa. The effort she had made had taken it out of her and
she was all in. Her face sagged and she looked an old woman. Lydia gave
her a glance, but said nothing. In a few minutes, with a sigh of
weariness, she raised herself to her feet and went to her room. When she
came back she had taken off her smart clothes and wore felt slippers and
a shabby black dress. Notwithstanding the marcelled hair, the paint on
her lips and the rouge on her face, she looked like an old charwoman.

"I'll see about preparing dinner," she said.

"Shall I come and help you?" asked Lydia.

"No, I prefer to be alone."

Lydia went on working. The silence in the little house was sinister. It
was so intense that the sound after a while of Robert inserting his
latch-key in the lock had all the effect of a frightening noise. Lydia
clenched her hands to prevent herself from crying out. He gave his
little whistle as he entered the house, and Lydia, gathering herself
together, went out into the passage. He had two or three papers in his
hand.

"I've brought you the evening papers," he cried gaily. "They're full of
the murder."

He went into the kitchen where he knew his mother would be and threw the
papers on the table. Lydia followed him in. Without a word Madame Berger
took one of them and began to read it. There were big headlines. It was
front-page news.

"I've been to Jojo's Bar. They can talk of nothing else. Jordan was one
of their regular clients and everybody knew him. I talked to him myself
on the night he was murdered. He'd not done so badly on the day's racing
and he was standing everybody drinks."

His conversation was so easy and natural, you would have thought he had
not a care in the world. His eyes glittered and there was a slight flush
on the cheeks that were usually rather pasty. He was excited, but showed
no sign of nervousness. Trying to make her tone as unconcerned as his,
Lydia asked him:

"Have they any idea who the murderer was?"

"They suspect it was a sailor. The concierge says she saw Jordan come in
with one about a week ago. But of course it may just as well have been
someone disguised as a sailor. They're rounding up the frequenters of
the notorious bars in Montmartre. From the condition of the skin round
the wound it appears that the blow was struck with great force. They're
looking for a husky, big man of powerful physique. Of course there are
one or two boxers who have a funny reputation."

Madame Berger put down the paper without remark.

"Dinner will be ready in a few minutes," she said. "Is the cloth laid,
Lydia?"

"I'll go and lay it."

When Robert was there they took the two principal meals of the day in
the dining-room, even though it gave more work. But Madame Berger said:

"We can't live like savages. Robert has been well brought up and he's
accustomed to having things done properly."

Robert went upstairs to change his coat and put on his slippers. Madame
Berger could not bear him to sit about the house in his best clothes.
Lydia set about laying the table. Suddenly a thought occurred to her,
and it was such a violent shock that she staggered and to support
herself had to put her hand on the back of a chair. It was two nights
before that Teddie Jordan had been murdered, and it was two nights
before that Robert had awakened her, made her cook supper for him, and
then hurried her to bed. He had come to her arms straight from
committing the horrible crime; and his passion, his insatiable desire,
the frenzy of his lust had their source in the blood of a human being.

"And if I conceived that night?"

Robert clattered downstairs in his slippers.

"I'm ready, Mummy," he cried.

"I'm coming."

He entered the dining-room and sat down in his usual place. He took his
napkin out of the ring and stretched over to take a piece of bread from
the platter on which Lydia had put it.

"Is the old woman giving us a decent dinner to-night? I've got a
beautiful appetite. I had nothing but a sandwich at Jojo's for lunch."

Madame Berger brought in the bowl of soup and taking her seat at the
head of the table ladled out a couple of spoonfuls for the three of
them. Robert was in high spirits. He talked gaily. But the two women
hardly answered. They finished the soup.

"What's coming next?" he asked.

"Cottage pie."

"Not one of my favourite dishes."

"Be thankful you have anything to eat at all," his mother answered
sharply.

He shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a gay wink. Madame Berger went
into the kitchen to fetch the cottage pie.

"The old woman doesn't seem in a very good-humour to-night. What's she
been doing with herself?"

"It was the _gnrale's_ last day of the season. She went there."

"The old bore! That's enough to put anyone out of temper."

Madame Berger brought in the dish and served it. Robert helped himself
to some wine and water. He went on talking of one thing and another, in
his usual ironical and rather amusing way, but at last he could ignore
no longer the taciturnity of his companions.

"But what is the matter with you both to-night?" he interrupted himself
angrily. "You sit there as glum as two mutes at a funeral."

His mother, forcing herself to eat, had been sitting with her eyes glued
to her plate, but now she raised them and, silently, looked him full in
the face.

"Well, what is it?" he cried flippantly.

She did not answer, but continued to stare at him. Lydia gave her a
glance. In those dark eyes, as full of expression as Robert's, she read
reproach, fear, anger, but also an unhappiness so poignant that it was
intolerable. Robert could not withstand the intensity of that anguished
gaze and dropped his eyes. They finished the meal in silence. Robert lit
a cigarette and gave one to Lydia. She went into the kitchen to fetch
the coffee. They drank it in silence.

There was a ring at the door. Madame Berger gave a little cry. They all
sat still as though they were paralysed. The ring was repeated.

"Who is that?" whispered Madame Berger.

"I'll go and see," said Robert. Then, with a hard look on his face:
"Pull yourself together, Mother. There's nothing to get upset about."

He went to the front door. They heard strange voices, but he had closed
the parlour door after him and they could not distinguish what was said.
In a minute or two he came back. Two men followed him into the room.

"Will you both go into the kitchen," he said. "These gentlemen wish to
talk to me."

"What do they want?"

"That is precisely what they are going to tell me," Robert answered
coolly.

The two women got up and went out. Lydia stole a glance at him. He
seemed perfectly self-possessed. It was impossible not to guess that the
two strangers were detectives. Madame Berger left the kitchen door open,
hoping she would be able to hear what was being said, but across the
passage, through a closed door, the words spoken were inaudible. The
conversation went on for the best part of an hour, then the door was
opened.

"Lydia, go and fetch me my coat and my shoes," cried Robert. "These
gentlemen want me to accompany them."

He spoke in his light, gay voice, as though his assurance were
unperturbed, but Lydia's heart sank. She went upstairs to do his
bidding. Madame Berger said never a word. Robert changed his coat and
put on his shoes.

"I shall be back in an hour or two," he said. "But don't wait up for
me."

"Where are you going?" asked his mother.

"They want me to go to the Commissariat. The Commissaire de Police
thinks I may be able to throw some light on the murder of poor Teddie
Jordan."

"What has it got to do with you?"

"Only that, like many others, I knew him."

Robert left the house with the two detectives.

"You'd better clear the table and help me to wash up," said Madame
Berger.

They washed up and put everything in its place. Then they sat on each
side of the kitchen table to wait. They did not speak. They avoided one
another's eyes. They sat for an interminable time. The only sound that
broke the ominous silence was the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the
passage. When it struck three Madame Berger got up.

"He won't come back to-night. We'd better go to bed."

"I couldn't sleep. I'd rather wait here."

"What is the good of that? It's only wasting the electric light. You've
got something to make you sleep, haven't you? Take a couple of tablets."

With a sigh Lydia rose to her feet. Madame Berger gave her a frowning
glance and burst out angrily:

"Don't look as if the world was coming to an end. You've got no reason
to pull a face like that. Robert's done nothing that can get him into
trouble. I don't know what you suspect."

Lydia did not answer, but she gave her a look so charged with pain that
Madame Berger dropped her eyes.

"Go to bed! Go to bed!" she cried angrily.

Lydia left her and went upstairs. She lay awake all night waiting for
Robert, but he did not come. When in the morning she came down, Madame
Berger had already been out to get the papers. The Jordan murder was
still front-page news, but there was no mention of an arrest; the
Commissaire was continuing his investigations. As soon as she had drunk
her coffee Madame Berger went out. It was eleven before she came back.
Lydia's heart sank when she saw her drawn face.

"Well?"

"They won't tell me anything. I got hold of the lawyer and he's gone to
the Commissariat."

They were finishing a miserable luncheon when there was a ring at the
front door. Lydia opened it and found Colonel Legrand and a man she had
not seen before. Behind them were two other men, whom she at once
recognised as the police officers who had come the night before, and a
grim-faced woman. Colonel Legrand asked for Madame Berger. Her anxiety
had brought her to the kitchen door, and, seeing her, the man who was
with him pushed past Lydia.

"Are you Madame Lontine Berger?"

"I am."

"I am Monsieur Lukas, Commissaire de Police. I have an order to search
this house." He produced a document. "Colonel Legrand has been
designated by your son, Robert Berger, to attend the search on his
behalf."

"Why do you want to search my house?"

"I trust that you will not attempt to prevent me from fulfilling my
duty."

She gave the Commissaire an angry, scornful look.

"If you have an order I have no power to prevent you."

Accompanied by the colonel and the two detectives the Commissaire went
upstairs, while the woman who had come with them remained in the kitchen
with Madame Berger and Lydia. There were two rooms on the upper floor, a
fairly large one which Robert and his wife used, and a smaller one in
which he had slept as a bachelor. There was besides only a bathroom with
a geyser. They spent nearly two hours there and when they came down the
Commissaire had in his hand Lydia's vanity-case.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"My husband gave it me."

"Where did he get it?"

"He bought it off a woman who was down and out."

The Commissaire gave her a searching look. His eyes fell on the
wrist-watch she was wearing and he pointed to it.

"Did your husband also give you that?"

"Yes."

He made no further observation. He put the vanity-case down and rejoined
his companions, who had gone into the double room which was part
dining-room and part parlour. But in a minute or two Lydia heard the
front door slam and looking out of the window saw one of the police
officers go to the gate and drive off in the car that was standing at
the kerb. She looked at the pretty vanity-case with sudden misgiving.
Presently, so that a search might be made of the kitchen, Lydia and
Madame Berger were invited to go into the parlour. Everything there was
in disorder. It was plain that the search had been thorough. The
curtains had been taken down and they lay on the floor. Madame Berger
winced when her eyes fell on them, and she opened her mouth to speak,
but by an effort of will kept silence. But when, after some time in the
kitchen, the men crossed the tiny patch of garden to the pavilion, she
could not prevent herself from going to the window and looking at them.
Lydia saw that she was trembling, and was afraid the woman who was with
them would see it too. But she was idly looking at a motor paper. Lydia
went up to the window and took her mother-in-law's hand. She dared not
even whisper that there was no danger. When Madame Berger saw the yellow
brocade curtains being taken down she clutched Lydia's hand violently,
and all Lydia could do was by an answering pressure to attempt to show
her that she need not fear. The men remained in the room nearly as long
as they had remained upstairs.

While they were there the officer who had gone away returned. After a
little he went out again and fetched two shovels from the waiting car.
The two underlings, with Colonel Legrand watching, proceeded to dig up
the flower bed. The Commissaire came into the sitting-room.

"Have you any objection to letting this lady search you?" he asked.

"None."

"None."

He turned to Lydia.

"Then perhaps Madame would go to her room with this person."

When Lydia went upstairs she saw why they had been so long. It looked as
though the room had been ransacked by burglars. On the bed were Robert's
clothes and she guessed that they had been subjected to very careful
scrutiny. The ordeal over, the Commissaire asked Lydia questions about
her husband's wardrobe. They were not difficult to answer, for it was
not extensive: two pairs of tennis trousers, two suits besides the one
he had on, a dinner-jacket and plus-fours; and she had no reason not to
reply truthfully. It was past seven o'clock when the search was at last
concluded. But the Commissaire had not yet done. He took up Lydia's
vanity-case which she had brought in from the kitchen and which was
lying on a table.

"I am going to take this away with me and also your watch, Madame, if
you will kindly give it me."

"Why?"

"I have reason to suspect that they are stolen goods."

Lydia stared at him in dismay. But Colonel Legrand stepped forward.

"You have no right to take them. Your warrant to search the house does
not permit you to remove a single thing from it."

The Commissaire smiled blandly.

"You are quite right, Monsieur, but my colleague has, on my
instructions, secured the necessary authority."

He made a slight gesture, whereupon the man who had gone away in the
car--on an errand which was now patent--produced from his pocket a
document, which he handed to him. The Commissaire passed it on to
Colonel Legrand. He read it and turned to Lydia.

"You must do as Monsieur le Commissaire desires."

She took the watch off her wrist. The Commissaire put it with the
vanity-case in his pocket.

"If my suspicions prove to be unfounded the objects will of course be
returned to you."

When at last they all left and Lydia had bolted the door behind them,
Madame Berger hurried across the garden. Lydia followed her. Madame
Berger gave a cry of consternation when she saw the condition in which
the room was.

"The brutes!"

She rushed to the curtains. They were lying on the floor. She gave a
piercing scream when she saw that the seams had been ripped up. She
flopped on to the ground and turned on Lydia a face contorted with
horror.

"Don't be afraid," said Lydia. "They didn't find the notes. I found them
and destroyed them. I knew you'd never have the courage."

She gave her hand to Madame Berger and helped her to her feet. Madame
Berger stared at her. They had never spoken of the subject that for
forty-eight hours had obsessed their tortured thoughts. But now the time
for silence was passed. Madame Berger seized Lydia's arm with a cruel
grip and in a harsh, intense voice said:

"I swear to you by all the love I bear him that Robert didn't murder the
Englishman."

"Why do you say that when you know as certainly as I do that he did?"

"Are you going to turn against him?"

"Does it look like it? Why do you suppose I destroyed those notes? You
must have been mad to think they wouldn't find them. Could you think a
trained detective would miss such an obvious hiding-place?"

Madame Berger released her hold of Lydia's arm. Her expression changed
and a sob burst from her throat. Suddenly she stretched out her arms,
took Lydia in them, and pressed her to her breast.

"Oh, my poor child, what trouble, what unhappiness I've brought upon
you."

It was the first time Lydia had ever seen Madame Berger betray emotion.
It was the first time she had ever known her show an uncalculated,
disinterested affection. Hard, painful sobs rent her breast and she
clung desperately to Lydia. Lydia was deeply moved. It was horrible to
see that self-controlled woman, with her pride and her iron will, break
down.

"I ought never to have let him marry you," she wailed. "It was a crime.
It was unfair to you. It seemed his only chance. Never, never, never
should I have allowed it."

"But I loved him."

"I know. But will you ever forgive him? Will you ever forgive me? I'm
his mother, it doesn't matter to me, but you're different; how can your
love survive this?"

Lydia snatched herself away and seized Madame Berger by the shoulders.
She almost shook her.

"Listen to me. I don't love for a month or a year. I love for always.
He's the only man I've loved. He's the only man I shall ever love.
Whatever he's done, whatever the future has in store, I love him.
Nothing can make me love him less. I adore him."

Next day the evening papers announced that Robert Berger had been
arrested for the murder of Teddie Jordan.

A few weeks later Lydia knew that she was with child and she realised
with horror that she had received the fertilising seed on the very night
of the brutal murder.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Silence fell between Lydia and Charley. They had long since finished
their dinner and the other diners had gone. Charley, listening without a
word, absorbed as he had never been in his life, to Lydia's story, had,
all the same, been conscious that the restaurant was empty and that the
waitresses were anxious for them to go, and once or twice he had been on
the point of suggesting to Lydia that they should move. But it was
difficult, for she spoke as if in a trance, and though often her eyes
met his he had an uncanny sensation that she did not see him. But then a
party of Americans came in, six of them, three men and three girls, and
asked if it was too late to have dinner. The _patronne_, foreseeing a
lucrative order, since they were all very lively, assured them that her
husband was the cook and, if they didn't mind waiting, would cook them
whatever they wished. They ordered champagne cocktails. They were out to
enjoy themselves and their gaiety filled the little restaurant with
laughter. But Lydia's tragic story seemed to encompass the table at
which she and Charley sat with a mysterious and sinister atmosphere
which the high spirits of that happy crowd could not penetrate; and they
sat in their corner, alone, as though they were surrounded by an
invisible wall.

"And do you love him still?" asked Charley at last.

"With all my heart."

She spoke with such a passionate sincerity that it was impossible not to
believe her. It was strange, and Charley could not prevent the slight
shiver of dismay that passed through him. She did not seem to belong to
quite the same human species as he did. That violence of feeling was
rather terrifying, and it made him a little uncomfortable to be with
her. He might have felt like that if he had been talking quite casually
to someone for an hour or two and then suddenly discovered it was a
ghost. But there was one thing that troubled him. It had been on his
mind for the last twenty-four hours, but not wishing her to think him
censorious, he had not spoken of it.

"In that case I can't help wondering how you can bear to be in a place
like the Srail. Couldn't you have found some other means of earning
your living?"

"Easily."

"Then I don't understand."

"People were very kind to me after the trial. I could have got a job as
saleswoman in one of the big shops. I'm a good needle-woman, I was
apprenticed to a dressmaker, I could have got work in that business.
There was even a man who wanted to marry me if I would divorce Robert."

There seemed nothing more to say, and Charley was silent. She planted
her elbows on the red-and-white-checkered table-cloth and rested her
face on her hands. Charley was sitting opposite to her and she gazed
into his eyes with a long reflective look that seemed to bore into the
depths of his being.

"I wanted to atone."

Charley stared at her uncomprehendingly. Her words, spoken hardly above
a whisper, gave him a shock. He had a sensation that he had never had
before; it seemed to him that a veil that painted the world in pleasant,
familiar colours had been suddenly rent and he looked into a convulsed
and writhing darkness.

"What in God's name do you mean?"

"Though I love Robert with all my heart, with all my soul, I know that
he sinned. I felt that the only way I could serve Robert now was by
submitting to a degradation that was the most horrible I could think of.
At first I thought I would go to one of those brothels where soldiers
go, and workmen, and the riff-raff of a great city, but I feared I
should feel pity for those poor people whose hurried, rare visits to
such places afford the only pleasure of their cruel lives. The Srail is
frequented by the rich, the idle, the vicious. There was no chance there
that I should feel anything but hatred and contempt for the beasts who
bought my body. There my humiliation is like a festering wound that
nothing can heal. The brutal indecency of the clothes I have to wear is
a shame that no habit can dull. I welcome the suffering. I welcome the
contempt these men have for the instrument of their lust. I welcome
their brutality. I'm in hell as Robert is in hell and my suffering joins
with his, and it may be that my suffering makes it more easy for him to
bear his."

"But he's suffering because he committed a crime. You suffered enough
for no fault of yours. Why should you expose yourself to suffering
unnecessarily?"

"Sin must be paid for by suffering. How can you with your cold English
nature know what the love is that is all my life? I am his and he is
mine. I should be as vile as his crime was if I hesitated to share his
suffering. I know that my suffering as well as his is necessary to
expiate his sin."

Charley hesitated. He had no particular religious feelings. He had been
brought up to believe in God, but not to think of him. To do that would
be--well, not exactly bad form, but rather priggish. It was difficult
for him now to say what he had in mind, but he found himself in a
situation where it seemed almost natural to say the most unnatural
things.

"Your husband committed a crime and was punished for it. I dare say
that's all right. But you can't think that a--a merciful God demands
atonement from you for somebody else's misdeeds."

"God? What has God to do with it? Do you suppose I can look at the
misery in which the vast majority of the people live in the world and
believe in God? Do you suppose I believe in God who let the Bolsheviks
kill my poor, simple father? Do you know what I think? I think God has
been dead for millions upon millions of years. I think when he took
infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the
universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped
a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for
them."

"But if you don't believe in God I can't see the point of what you're
doing. I could understand it if you believed in a cruel God who exacted
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Atonement, the sort of
atonement you want to make, is meaningless if there's no God."

"You would have thought so, wouldn't you? There's no logic in it.
There's no sense. And yet, deep down in my heart, no, much more than
that, in every fibre of my body, I know that I must atone for Robert's
sin. I know that that is the only way he can gain release from the evil
that racks him. I don't ask you to think I'm reasonable. I only ask you
to understand that I can't help myself. I believe that somehow--how I
don't know--my humiliation, my degradation, my bitter, ceaseless pain,
will wash his soul clean, and even if we never see one another again he
will be restored to me."

Charley sighed. It was all strange to him, strange, morbid and
disturbing. He did not know what to make of it. He felt more than ever
ill at ease with that alien woman with her crazy fancies; and yet she
looked ordinary enough, a prettyish little thing, not very well-dressed;
a typist or a girl in the post office. Just then, at the Terry-Masons',
they would probably have started dancing; they would be wearing the
paper caps they'd got out of the crackers at dinner. Some of the chaps
would be a bit tight, but, hang it all, on Christmas Day no one could
mind. There'd have been a lot of kissing under the mistletoe, a lot of
fun, a lot of ragging, a lot of laughter; they were all having a grand
time. It seemed very far away, but, thank God, it was there, normal,
decent, sane and real; this was a nightmare. A nightmare? He wondered if
there was anything in what she said, this woman with her tragic history
and her miserable life, that God had died when he created the wide
world; and was he lying dead on some vast mountain range on a dead star
or was he absorbed into the universe he had caused to be? It was rather
funny, if you came to think of it, Lady Terry-Mason rounding up all the
house party to go to church on Christmas morning. And his own father
backing her up.

"I don't pretend I'm much of a church-goer myself, but I think one ought
to go on Christmas Day. I mean, I think it sets a good example."

That's what he would say.

"Don't look so serious," said Lydia. "Let's go."

They walked along the forbidding, sordid street that leads from the
Avenue du Maine to the Place de Rennes, and there Lydia suggested that
they should go to the newsreel for an hour. It was the last performance
of the day. Then they had a glass of beer and went back to the hotel.
Lydia took off her hat and the fur she wore round her neck. She looked
at Charley thoughtfully.

"If you want to come to bed with me you can, you know," she said in just
the same tone as she might have used if she had asked him if he would
like to go to the Rotonde or the Dme.

Charley caught his breath. All his nerves revolted from the idea. After
what she had told him he could not have touched her. His mouth for a
moment went grim with anger; he really was not going to have her mortify
her flesh at his expense. But his native politeness prevented him from
uttering the words that were on the tip of his tongue.

"Oh, I don't think so, thank you."

"Why not? I'm here for that and that's what you came to Paris for, isn't
it? Isn't that why all you English come to Paris?"

"I don't know. Anyhow I didn't."

"What else did you come for?"

"Well, partly to see some pictures."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It's just as you like."

She went into the bathroom. Charley was a trifle piqued that she
accepted his refusal with so much unconcern. He thought at least she
might have given him credit for his delicacy. Because perhaps she owed
him something, at least board and lodging for twenty-four hours, he
might well have looked upon it as a right to take what she offered; it
wouldn't have been unbecoming if she had thanked him for his
disinterestedness. He was inclined to sulk. He undressed, and when she
came in from the bathroom, in his dressing-gown, he went in to wash his
teeth. She was in bed when he returned.

"Will it bother you if I read a little before I go to sleep?" he asked.

"No. I'll turn my back to the light."

He had brought a Blake with him. He began to read. Presently from
Lydia's quiet breathing in the next bed he knew she was asleep. He read
on for a little and switched off the light.

Thus did Charley Mason spend Christmas Day in Paris.




                               CHAPTER VI


They did not wake till so late next morning that by the time they had
had their coffee, read the papers (like a domestic couple who had been
married for years), bathed and dressed, it was nearly one.

"We might go along and have a cocktail at the Dme and then lunch," he
said. "Where would you like to go?"

"There's a very good restaurant on the boulevard in the other direction
from the Coupole. Only it's rather expensive."

"Well, that doesn't matter."

"Are you sure?" She looked at him doubtfully. "I don't want you to spend
more than you can afford. You've been very sweet to me. I'm afraid I've
taken advantage of your kindness."

"Oh, rot!" he answered, flushing.

"You don't know what it's meant to me, these two days. Such a rest. Last
night's the first night for months that I've slept without waking and
without dreams. I feel so refreshed. I feel quite different."

She did indeed look much better this morning. Her skin was clearer and
her eyes brighter. She held her head more alertly.

"It's been a wonderful little holiday you've given me. It's helped me so
much. But I mustn't be a burden to you."

"You haven't been."

She smiled with gentle irony.

"You've been very well brought up, my dear. It's nice of you to say
that, and I'm so unused to having people say nice things to me that it
makes me want to cry. But after all you've come to Paris to have a good
time; you know now you're not likely to have it with me. You're young
and you must enjoy your youth. It lasts so short a while. Give me lunch
to-day if you like and this afternoon I'll go back to Alexey's."

"And to-night to the Srail?"

"I suppose so."

She sighed, but she checked the sigh and with a little gay shrug of the
shoulders gave him a bright smile. Frowning slightly in his uncertainty
Charley looked at her with pained eyes. He felt awkward and big, and his
radiant health, his sense of well-being, the high spirits that bubbled
inside him, seemed to himself in an odd way an offence. He was like a
rich man vulgarly displaying his wealth to a poor relation. She looked
very frail, a slim little thing in a shabby brown dress, and after that
good-night so much younger that she seemed almost a child. How could you
help being sorry for her? And when you thought of her tragic story, when
you thought--oh, unwillingly, for it was ghastly and senseless, yet
troubling so that it haunted you--of that crazy idea of hers of atoning
for her husband's crime by her own degradation, your heart-strings were
wrung. You felt that you didn't matter at all, and if your holiday in
Paris, to which you'd looked forward with such excitement, was a
wash-out--well, you just had to put up with it. It didn't seem to
Charley that it was he who was uttering the halting words he spoke, but
a power within him that acted independently of his will. When he heard
them issue from his lips he didn't even then know why he said them.

"I don't have to get back to the office till Monday morning and I'm
staying till Sunday. If you care to stay on here till then, I don't see
why you shouldn't."

Her face lit up so that you might have thought a haphazard ray of the
winter sun had strayed into the room.

"Do you mean that?"

"Otherwise I wouldn't have suggested it."

It looked as though her legs suddenly gave way, for she sank on to a
chair.

"Oh, it would be such a blessing. It would be such a rest. It would give
me new courage. But I can't, I can't."

"Why not? On account of the Srail?"

"Oh, no, not that. I could send them a wire to say I had influenza. It's
not fair to you."

"That's my business, isn't it?"

It seemed a bit grim to Charley that he should have to persuade her to
do what it was quite plain she was only too anxious to do, and what he
would just as soon she didn't. But he didn't see how else he could act
now. She gave him a searching look.

"Why should you do this? You don't want me, do you?" He shook his head.
"What can it matter to you if I live or die, what can it matter to you
if I'm happy or not? You've not known me forty-eight hours yet.
Friendship? I'm a stranger to you. Pity? What has one got to do with
pity at your age?"

"I wish you wouldn't ask me embarrassing questions," he grinned.

"I suppose it's just natural goodness of heart. They always say the
English are kind to animals. I remember one of our landladies who used
to steal our tea took in a mangy mongrel because it was homeless."

"If you weren't so small I'd give you a smack on the face for that," he
retorted cheerfully. "Is it a go?"

"Let's go out and have lunch. I'm hungry."

During luncheon they spoke of indifferent things, but when they had
finished and Charley, having paid the bill, was waiting for his change,
she said to him:

"Did you really mean it when you said I could stay with you till you
went away?"

"Definitely."

"You don't know what a boon it would be to me. I can't tell you how I
long to take you at your word."

"Then why don't you?"

"It won't be much fun for you."

"No, it won't," he answered frankly, but with a charming smile. "But
it'll be interesting."

She laughed.

"Then I'll go back to Alexey's and get a few things. At least a
toothbrush and some clean stockings."

They separated at the station and Lydia took the Metro. Charley thought
that he would see if Simon was in. After asking his way two or three
times he found the Rue Campagne Premire. The house in which Simon lived
was tall and dingy, and the wood of the shutters showed grey under the
crumbling paint. When Charley put in his head at the concierge's lodge
he was almost knocked down by the stink of fug, food and human body that
assailed his nostrils. A little old woman in voluminous skirts, with her
head wrapped in a dirty red muffler, told him in rasping, angry tones,
as though she violently resented his intrusion, where exactly Simon
lived, and when Charley asked if he was in bade him go and see. Charley,
following her directions, went through the dirty courtyard and up a
narrow staircase smelling of stale urine. Simon lived on the second
floor and in answer to Charley's ring opened the door.

"H'm. I wondered what had become of you."

"Am I disturbing you?"

"No. Come in. You'd better keep on your coat. It's not very warm in
here."

That was true. It was icy. It was a studio, with a large north light,
and there was a stove in it, but Simon, who had apparently been working,
for the table in the middle was littered with papers, had forgotten to
keep it up and the fire was almost out. Simon drew a shabby arm-chair up
to the stove and asked Charley to sit down.

"I'll put some more coke on. It'll soon get warmer. I don't feel the
cold myself."

Charley found that the arm-chair, having a broken spring, was none too
comfortable. The walls of the studio were a cold slate-grey, and they
too looked as though they hadn't been painted for years. Their only
ornament was large maps tacked up with drawing-pins. There was a narrow
iron bed which hadn't been made.

"The concierge hasn't been up to-day yet," said Simon, following
Charley's glance.

There was nothing else in the studio but the large dining-table, bought
second-hand, which Simon wrote at, some shelves with books in them, a
desk-chair such as they use in offices, two or three kitchen chairs
piled up with books, and a strip of worn carpet by the bed. It was
cheerless and the cold winter light coming in through the north window
added its moroseness to the squalid scene. A third-class waiting-room at
a wayside station could not have seemed more unfriendly.

Simon drew a chair up to the stove and lit a pipe. With his quick wits
he guessed the impression his surroundings were making on Charley and
smiled grimly.

"It's not very luxurious, is it? But then I don't want luxury." Charley
was silent and Simon gave him a coolly disdainful look. "It's not even
comfortable, but then I don't want comfort. No one should be dependent
on it. It's a trap that's caught many a man who you would have thought
had more sense."

Charley was not without a streak of malice and he was not inclined to
let Simon put it over on him.

"You look cold and peaked and hungry, old boy. What about taking a taxi
to the Ritz Bar and having some scrambled eggs and bacon in warmth and
comfortable arm-chairs?"

"Go to hell. What have you done with Olga?"

"Her name's Lydia. She's gone home to get a toothbrush. She's staying
with me at the hotel till I go back to London."

"The devil she is. Going some, aren't you?" The two young men stared at
one another for a moment. Simon leant forward.

"You haven't fallen for her, have you?"

"Why did you bring us together?"

"I thought it would be rather a joke. I thought it would be a new
experience for you to go to bed with the wife of a notorious murderer.
And to tell you the truth, I thought she might fall for you. I should
laugh like a hyena if she has. After all, you're rather the same type as
Berger, but a damned sight better-looking."

Charley suddenly remembered a remark that Lydia had made when they were
having supper together after the Midnight Mass. He had not understood
what she meant at the time, but now he did.

"It may surprise you to learn that she tumbled to that. I'm afraid you
won't be able to laugh like a hyena."

"Have you been together ever since I left you with her on Christmas
Eve?"

"Yes."

"It seems to agree with you. You look all right. A bit pale, perhaps."

Charley tried not to look self-conscious. He would not for the world
have had Simon know that his relations with Lydia had been entirely
platonic. It would only have aroused his derisive laughter. He would
have looked upon Charley's behaviour as despicably sentimental.

"I don't think it was a very good joke to get me off with her without
letting me know what I was in for," said Charley.

Simon gave him a tortured smile.

"It appealed to my sense of humour. It'll be something to tell your
parents when you go home. Anyhow you've got nothing to grouse about.
It's all panned out very well. Olga knows her job and will give you a
damned good time in that way, and she's no fool; she's read a lot and
she can talk much more intelligently than most women. It'll be a liberal
education, my boy. D'you think she's as much in love with her husband as
ever she was?"

"I think so."

"Curious, human nature is, isn't it? He was an awful rotter, you know. I
suppose you know why she's at the Srail? She wants to make enough money
to pay for his escape; then she'll join him in Brazil."

Charley was disconcerted. He had believed her when she told him that she
was there because she wanted to atone for Robert's sin, and even though
the notion had seemed to him extravagant there was something about it
that had strangely moved him. It was a shock to think that she might
have lied to him. If what Simon said were true she had just been making
a fool of him.

"I covered the trial for our paper, you know," Simon went on. "It caused
rather a sensation in England because the fellow that Berger killed was
an Englishman, and they gave it a lot of space. It was a snip for me;
I'd never been to a murder trial in France before and I was pretty keen
to see one. I've been to the Old Bailey, and I was curious to compare
their methods with ours. I wrote a very full account of it; I've got it
here; I'll give it you to read if you like."

"Yes, I would."

"The murder created a great stir in France. You see, Robert Berger
wasn't an apache or anything like that. He was by way of being a gent.
His people were very decent. He was well-educated and he spoke English
quite passably. One of the papers called him the Gentleman Gangster and
it caught on; it took the public fancy and made him quite a celebrity.
He was good-looking too, in his way, and young, only twenty-two, and
that helped. The women all went crazy over him. God, the crush there was
to get into the trial! It was a real thrill when he came into the
court-room. He was brought in between two warders for the press
photographers to have a go at him before the judges came in. I never saw
anyone so cool. He was quite nicely dressed and he knew how to wear his
clothes. He was freshly shaved and his hair was very neat. He had a fine
head of dark brown hair. He smiled at the photographers and turned this
way and that, as they asked him to, so that they could all get a good
view of him. He looked like any young chap with plenty of money that you
might see at the Ritz Bar having a drink with a girl. It tickled me to
think that he was such a rogue. He was a born criminal. Of course his
people weren't rich, but they weren't starving, and I don't suppose he
ever really wanted for a hundred francs. I wrote a rather pretty article
about him for one of the weekly papers, and the French press printed
extracts from it. It did me a bit of good over here. I took the line
that he engaged in crime as a form of sport. See the idea? It worked up
quite amusingly. He'd been almost a first-class tennis player and there
was some talk of training him for championship play, but oddly enough,
though he played a grand game in ordinary matches--he had a good serve
and was quick at the net, when it came to tournaments he always fell
down. Something went wrong then. He hadn't got the power of resistance,
determination or whatever it is, that the great tennis player has got to
have. An interesting psychological point, I thought. Anyhow his career
as a tennis player came to an end because money began to be missed from
the changing-room when he was about, and though it was never actually
proved that he'd taken it everyone concerned was pretty well convinced
that he was the culprit."

Simon relit his pipe.

"One thing that peculiarly struck me in Robert Berger was his
combination of nerve, self-possession and charm. Of course charm is an
invaluable quality, but it doesn't often go with nerve and
self-possession. Charming people are generally weak and irresolute,
charm is the weapon nature gives them to cope with their disadvantages;
I would never set much trust in anyone who had it."

Charley gave his friend a slightly amused glance; he knew that Simon was
belittling a quality he did not think he possessed in order to assure
himself that it was of no great consequence beside those he was
convinced he had. But he did not interrupt.

"Robert Berger was neither weak nor irresolute. He very nearly got away
with his murder. It was a damned smart bit of work on the part of the
police that they got him. There was nothing sensational or spectacular
in the way they went about the job; they were just thorough and patient.
Perhaps accident helped them a little, but they were clever enough to
take advantage of it. People must always be prepared to do that, you
know, and they seldom are."

An absent look came into Simon's eyes, and once more Charley was aware
that he was thinking of himself.

"What Lydia didn't tell me was how the police first came to suspect
him," said Charley.

"When first they questioned him they hadn't the ghost of an idea that he
had anything to do with the murder. They were looking for a much bigger
man."

"What sort of a chap was Jordan?"

"I never ran across him. He was a bad hat, but he was all right in his
way. Everybody liked him. He was always ready to stand you a drink, and
if you were down and out he never minded putting his hand in his pocket.
He was a little fellow, he'd been a jockey, but he'd got warned off in
England, and it turned out later that he'd done nine months at Wormwood
Scrubs for false pretences. He was thirty-six. He'd been in Paris ten
years. The police had an idea that he was mixed up in the drug traffic,
but they'd never been able to get the goods on him."

"But how did the police come to question Berger at all?"

"He was one of the frequenters of Jojo's Bar. That's where Jordan used
to have his meals. It's rather a shady place patronised by bookmakers
and jockeys, touts, runners and the sort of people with the reputation
that we journalists describe as unsavoury, and naturally the police
interviewed as many of them as they could get hold of. You see, Jordan
had a date with someone that night--that was shown by the fact that
there were a couple of glasses on the tray and a cake, and they thought
he might have dropped a hint about whom he was going to meet. They had a
pretty shrewd suspicion that he was queer, and it was just possible one
of the chaps at Jojo's had seen him about with someone. Berger had been
rather pally with Jordan, and Jojo, the owner of the bar, told the
police he'd seen him touch the bookie for money several times. Berger
had been tried on a charge of smuggling heroin into France from Belgium,
and the two men who were up with him went to jug, but he got off
somehow. The police knew he was as guilty as hell, and if Jordan had
been mixed up with dope and had met his death in connection with that,
they thought Berger might very well know who was responsible. He was a
bad lot. He'd been convicted on another charge, stealing motor-cars, and
got a suspended sentence of two years."

"Yes, I know that," said Charley.

"His system was as simple as it was ingenious. He used to wait till he
saw someone drive up to one of the big stores, the Printemps or the Bon
March, in a Citron, and go in, leaving it at the kerb. Then he'd walk
up, as bold as brass, as though he'd just come out of the store, jump in
and drive off."

"But didn't they lock the cars?"

"Seldom. And he had some Citron keys. He always stuck to the one make.
He'd use the car for two or three days and then leave it somewhere, and
when he wanted another, he'd start again. He stole dozens. He never
tried to sell them, he just borrowed them when he wanted one for a
particular purpose. That was what gave me the idea for my article. He
pinched them for the fun of the thing, for the pleasure of exercising
his audacious cleverness. He had another ingenious dodge that came out
at the trial. He'd hang around in his car about the bus stops just at
the time the shops closed, and when he saw a woman waiting for a bus
he'd stop and ask her if she'd like a lift. I suppose he was a pretty
good judge of character and knew the sort of woman who'd be likely to
accept a ride from a good-looking young man. Well, the woman got in and
he'd drive off in the direction she wanted to go, and when they came to
a more or less deserted street he stalled the car. He pretended he
couldn't get it to start and he would ask the woman to get out, lift the
hood and tickle the carburettor while he pressed the self-starter. The
woman did so, leaving her bag and her parcels in the car, and just as
she was going to get in again, when the engine was running, he'd shoot
off and be out of sight before she realised what he was up to. Of course
a good many women went and complained to the police, but they'd only
seen him in the dark, and all they could say was that he was a
good-looking, gentlemanly young man in a Citron, with a pleasant voice,
and all the police could do was to tell them that it was very unwise to
accept lifts from good-looking, gentlemanly young men. He was never
caught. At the trial it came out that he must often have done very well
out of these transactions.

"Anyhow a couple of police officers went to see him. He didn't deny that
he'd been at Jojo's Bar on the evening of the murder and had been with
Jordan, but he said he'd left about ten o'clock and hadn't seen him
after that. After some conversation they invited him to accompany them
to the Commissariat. The Commissaire de Police who was in charge of the
preliminary proceedings had no notion, mind you, that Berger was the
murderer. He thought it was a toss-up whether Jordan had been killed by
some tough that he'd brought to his flat or by a member of the drug-ring
whom he might have double-crossed. If the latter, he thought he could
wheedle, jockey, bully or frighten Berger into giving some indication
that would enable the police to catch the man they were after.

"I managed to get an interview with the Commissaire. He was a chap
called Lukas. He was not at all the sort of type you'd expect to find in
a job like that. He was a big, fat, hearty fellow, with red cheeks, a
heavy moustache and great shining black eyes. He was a jolly soul and
you'd have bet a packet that there was nothing he enjoyed more than a
good dinner and a bottle of wine. He came from the Midi and he had an
accent that you could cut with a knife. He had a fat, jovial laugh. He
was a friendly, back-slapping, good-natured man to all appearances and
you felt inclined to confide in him. In point of fact he'd had wonderful
success in getting confessions out of suspects. He had great physical
endurance and was capable of conducting an examination for sixteen hours
at a stretch. There's no third degree in France of the American sort, no
knocking about, I mean, or tooth-drilling or anything like that, to
extort a confession; they just bring a man into the room and make him
stand, they don't let him smoke and they don't give him anything to eat,
they just ask him questions; they go on and on, they smoke, and when
they're hungry they have a meal brought in to them; they go on all
night, because they know that at night a man's powers of resistance are
at their lowest; and if he's guilty he has to be very strong-minded if
by morning for the sake of a cup of coffee and a cigarette he won't
confess. The Commissaire got nothing out of Berger. He admitted that at
one time he'd been friendly with the heroin smugglers, but he asserted
his innocence of the charge on which he'd been tried and acquitted. He
said he'd done stupid things in his youth, but he'd had his lesson;
after all, he'd only borrowed cars for two or three days to take girls
out, it wasn't a very serious crime, and now that he was married he was
going straight. As far as the drug traffickers were concerned he'd had
nothing to do with them since his trial and he had had no idea that
Teddie Jordan was mixed up with them. He was very frank. He told the
Commissaire that he was very much in love with his wife, and his great
fear was that she would discover his past. For her sake as well as for
his own and his mother's, he was determined to lead in future a decent
and honourable life. The fat, jolly man went on asking questions, but in
a friendly, sympathetic way so that you felt, I think, that he couldn't
wish you any harm. He applauded Berger's good resolutions, he
congratulated him on marrying a penniless girl for love, he hoped they
would have children which were not only an ornament to a home but a
comfort to their parents. But he had Berger's dossier; he knew that in
the heroin case, though the jury had refused to convict, he was
undoubtedly guilty, and, from enquiries he had made that day, that he
had been discharged from the broker's firm and had only escaped
prosecution because his mother had made restitution of the money he had
embezzled. It was a lie that since his marriage he had been leading an
honest life. He asked him about his financial circumstances. Berger
confessed that they were difficult, but his mother had a little and soon
he was bound to get a job and then they would be all right. And pocket
money? Now and then he made a bit racing, and he introduced clients to
bookmakers--that was how he'd become friendly with Jordan--and got a
commission. Sometimes he just went without.

"'_En effet_,' said the Commissaire, 'the day before he was killed you
said you were penniless and you borrowed fifty francs from Jordan.'

"'He was good to me. Poor chap. I shall miss him.'

"The Commissaire was looking at Berger with his friendly, twinkling
eyes, and it occurred to him that the young man was not ill-favoured.
Was it possible? But no, that was nonsense. He had a notion that Berger
was lying when he said he had given up all relations with the drug
traffickers. After all, he was hard up and there was good money to be
made there; Berger went about among the sort of people who were addicted
to dope. The Commissaire had an impression, though he had no notion on
what he founded it, that Berger, if he didn't know for certain who'd
committed the murder, had his suspicions: of course he wouldn't tell,
but if they found heroin hidden away in the house at Neuilly they might
be able to force him to. The Commissaire was a shrewd judge of character
and he was pretty sure that Berger would give a friend away to save his
own skin. He made up his mind that he would hold Berger and have the
house searched before he had any chance of disposing of anything that
was there. With the same idea in his mind he asked him about his
movements on the night of the murder. Berger stated that he had come in
from Neuilly rather late and had walked to Jojo's Bar; he had found a
lot of men there who had come in after the races. He got two or three
drinks stood him, and Jordan, who'd had a good day, said he'd pay for
his dinner. After he'd eaten he hung about for a bit, but it was very
smoky and it made his head ache, so he went for a stroll on the
boulevard. Then about eleven he went back to the bar and stayed there
till it was time to catch the last Metro back to Neuilly.

"'You were away just long enough to kill the Englishman in point of
fact,' said the Commissaire in a joking sort of way.

"Berger burst out laughing.

"'You're not going to accuse me of that?' he said.

"'No, not that,' laughed the other.

"'Believe me, Jordan's death is a loss to me. The fifty francs he lent
me the day before he was murdered wasn't the first I'd had from him. I
don't say it was very scrupulous, but when he'd had a few drinks it
wasn't hard to get money out of him.'

"'Still, he'd made a lot that day, and though he wasn't drunk when he
left the bar, he was in a happy mood. You might have thought it worth
while to make sure of a few thousand francs at one go rather than get it
in fifties from time to time.'

"The Commissaire said this more to tease than because he thought there
was anything in it. And he didn't think it a bad thing to let Berger
suppose he was a possible object of suspicion. It would certainly not
make him less inclined to tell the culprit's name if he had an inkling
of it. Berger took out the money in his pocket and put it on the table.
It amounted to less than ten francs.

"'If I'd robbed poor Jordan of his money you don't suppose I'd only have
that in my pocket now.'

"'My dear boy, I suppose nothing. I only pointed out that you had the
time to kill Jordan and that money would have been useful to you.'

"Berger gave him his frank and disarming smile.

"'Both those things I admit,' he said.

"'I will be perfectly open with you,' said the other. 'I don't think you
murdered Jordan, but I'm fairly certain that if you don't know who did,
you have at least a suspicion.'

"Berger denied this, and though the Commissaire pressed him, persisted
in his denial. It was late by now and the Commissaire thought it would
be better to resume the conversation next day; he thought also that a
night in the cells would give Berger an opportunity to consider his
position. Berger, who had been arrested twice before, knew that it was
useless to protest.

"You know that the dope traffickers are up to every sort of trick to
conceal their dope. They hide it in hollow walking-sticks, in the heels
of shoes, in the lining of old clothes, in mattresses and pillows, in
the frames of bedsteads, in every imaginable place, but the police know
all their dodges, and you can bet your boots that if there'd been
anything in the house at Neuilly they'd have found it. They found
nothing. But when the Commissaire had been going through Lydia's bedroom
he'd come across a vanity-case, and it struck him that it was an
expensive one for a woman of that modest class to have. She had a watch
on that looked as if it had cost quite a lot of money. She said that her
husband had given her both the watch and the vanity-case, and it
occurred to the Commissaire that it might be interesting to find out how
he had got the money to buy them. On getting back to his office he had
enquiries made and in a very short while learnt that several women had
reported that they had had bags stolen by a young man who had offered
them lifts in a Citron. One woman had left a description of a
vanity-case which she had thus lost and it corresponded with that which
the Commissaire had found in Lydia's possession; another stated that
there had been in her bag a gold watch from such and such a maker. The
same maker's name was on Lydia's. It was plain that the mysterious young
man whom the police had never been able to lay their hands on was Robert
Berger. That didn't seem to bring the solution of the Jordan murder any
nearer, but it gave the Commissaire an additional weapon to induce
Berger to spill the beans. He had him brought into his room and asked
him to explain how he had come by the vanity-case and the watch. Berger
said he'd bought one of them from a tart who wanted money and the other
from a man he'd met in a bar. He could give the name of neither. They
were casual persons whom he'd got into conversation with and had neither
seen before nor since. The Commissaire then formally arrested him on a
charge of theft and, telling him that he would be confronted next
morning with the two women to whom he was convinced the articles
belonged, tried to persuade him to save trouble by making a confession.
But Berger stuck to his story and refused to answer any more questions
till he had the assistance of a lawyer, which by French law, now that he
was arrested, he was entitled to have at an examination. The Commissaire
could do nothing but acquiesce, and that finished the proceedings for
the night.

"On the following morning the two women in question came to the
Commissariat and immediately they were shown the objects recognised
them. Berger was brought in and one of them at once identified him as
the obliging young man who had given her a lift. The other was doubtful;
it was night when she had accepted his offer to drive her home and she
had not seen his face very well, but she thought she would recognise his
voice. Berger was told to read out a couple of sentences from a paper
and he had not read half a dozen words before the woman cried out that
she was certain it was the same man. I may tell you that Berger had a
peculiarly soft and caressing voice. The women were dismissed and Berger
taken back to the cell. The vanity-case and the watch were on the table
before him and the Commissaire looked at them idly. Suddenly his
expression grew more intent."

Charley interrupted.

"Simon, how could you know that? You're romancing."

Simon laughed.

"I'm dramatising a little. I'm telling you what I said in my first
article. I had to make as good a story out of it as I could, you know."

"Go on, then."

"Well, he sent for one of his men, and asked him if Berger had on a
wrist-watch when he was arrested, and if he had, to bring it. Remember,
all this came out at the trial afterwards. The cop got Berger's watch.
It was an imitation gold thing, in a metal that I think's called aureum,
and it had a round face. The press had given a lot of details about
Jordan's murder; they'd said, for instance, that the knife with which
the blow had been inflicted hadn't been found, and, incidentally, it
never was; and they'd said that the police hadn't discovered any
finger-prints. You'd have expected to find some either on the leather
note-case in which Jordan had kept his money or on the door handle; and
of course they deduced from that that the murderer had worn gloves. But
what they didn't say, because the police had taken care to keep it dark,
was that when they had gone through Jordan's room with a fine comb they
had found fragments of a broken watch-glass. It couldn't have belonged
to Jordan's watch, and it needn't necessarily have belonged to the
murderer's, but there was just a chance that somehow or other, in his
nervousness or haste, by an accidental knock against a piece of
furniture, the murderer had broken the glass of his watch. It wasn't a
thing he would be likely to notice at such a moment. Not all the pieces
had been found but enough to show that the watch they had belonged to
was small and oblong. The Commissaire had the pieces in an envelope,
carefully wrapped up in tissue paper, and he now laid them out before
him. They would have exactly fitted Lydia's watch. It might be only a
coincidence; there were in use thousands of watches of just that size
and shape. Lydia's had a glass. But the Commissaire pondered. He turned
over in his mind various possibilities. They seemed so far-fetched that
he shrugged his shoulders. Of course during the period, three-quarters
of an hour at least, that Berger claimed he'd been strolling along the
boulevard, he would have had plenty of time to get to Jordan's
apartment, a ten minutes' walk from Jojo's Bar, commit the murder, wash
his hands, tidy himself up, and walk back again; but why should he have
been wearing his wife's watch? He had one of his own. His own, of
course, might have been out of order. The Commissaire nodded his head
thoughtfully."

Charley giggled.

"Really, Simon."

"Shut up. He gave instructions that plain-clothes men should go to every
watchmaker's within a radius of two miles round the house at Neuilly
where the Bergers lived. They were to ask if within the last week any
watchmaker had repaired a watch in imitation gold or had put a glass in
a small lady's watch with an oblong face. Within a few hours one of the
men came back and said that a watchmaker, not more than a quarter of a
mile from the Bergers' house, said that he had repaired a watch
corresponding to the description and it had been called for, and at the
same time the customer had brought another watch to have a glass put in.
He had done it on the spot and she had come in for it half an hour
later. He couldn't remember what the customer looked like, but he
thought she had a Russian accent. The two watches were taken for the
watchmaker to look at and he claimed that they were those he had
repaired. The Commissaire beamed as he might have beamed if he had a
great plate of bouillabaisse set before him in the Old Port at
Marseilles. He knew he'd got his man."

"What was the explanation?" asked Charley.

"Simple as A B C. Berger had broken his watch and borrowed the one he'd
given to Lydia. She hardly ever went out and didn't need it. You must
remember that in those days she was a quiet, modest, rather shy girl
with few friends of her own, and I should say somewhat lethargic. At the
trial two men swore that they'd noticed Berger wearing it. Jojo, who was
a police informer, knew that Berger was a crook and wondered how he had
got it. In a casual way he mentioned to Berger that he had a new watch
on and Berger told him it was his wife's. Lydia went to the watchmaker's
to get her husband's watch the morning after the murder, and very
naturally, since she was there, had a new glass put in her own. It never
occurred to her to mention it and Berger never knew that he had broken
it."

"But you don't mean to say that he was convicted on that?"

"No. But it was enough to justify the Commissaire charging him with the
murder. He thought, quite rightly as it turned out, that new evidence
would be forthcoming. All through his interrogations Berger conducted
himself with amazing adroitness and self-possession. He admitted
everything that could be proved and no longer attempted to deny that it
was he who had robbed all those women of their handbags, he admitted
that even after his conviction he had gone on pinching cars whenever he
wanted one; he said the ease with which it could be done was too much
for him and the risk appealed to his adventurousness; but he denied
absolutely that he'd had anything to do with the murder. He claimed that
the fact of the pieces of glass fitting Lydia's watch proved nothing,
and she swore black and blue that she'd broken the glass herself. The
_juge d'instruction_ in whose charge the case was of course eventually
placed was puzzled because no trace could be found of the money Berger
must have stolen, and actually it never was found. Another odd thing was
that there was no trace of blood on the clothes that Berger was wearing
on that particular night. The knife wasn't found either. It was proved
that Berger had one, in the circles he moved in that was usual enough,
but he swore that he'd lost it a month before. I told you that the
detectives' work was pretty good. There'd been no finger-prints on the
stolen cars nor on the stolen handbags, which when he'd emptied he'd
apparently just thrown into the street and some of which had eventually
got into the hands of the police, so it was pretty obvious that he had
worn gloves. They found a pair of leather gauntlets among his things,
but it was unlikely that he would have kept them on when he went to see
Jordan, and from the place in which the body was found, which suggested
that Jordan had been changing a record when he was struck, it was plain
that Berger hadn't murdered him the moment Jordan let him into the room.
Besides, they were too large to go in his pocket and if he had had them
at the bar someone would have noticed them. Of course Berger's photo had
been published in all the papers, and in their difficulty the police got
the press to help them. They asked anyone who could remember having sold
about such-and-such a date a pair of gloves, probably grey, to a young
man in a grey suit, to come forward. The papers made rather a thing
about it; they put his photo in again with the caption: 'Did you sell
him the gloves he wore to kill Teddie Jordan?'

"You know, a thing that has always struck me is people's fiendish
eagerness to give anyone away. They pretend it's public spirit: I don't
believe a word of it; I don't believe it's even, as a rule anyway, the
desire for notoriety; I believe it's just due to the baseness of human
nature that gets a kick out of injuring others. You know, of course,
that in England the Treasury and the King's Proctor are supposed to have
a wonderful system of espionage to detect income-tax evasions, and
collusion and so forth in divorce cases. Well, there's not a word of
truth in it. They depend entirely on anonymous letters. There are a
whole mass of people who can't wait if they have the chance of doing
down someone who's trying to get away with anything."

"It's a grim thought," said Charley, but added cheerfully: "I can only
hope you're exaggerating."

"Well, anyhow, a woman from the glove department at the Trois Quartiers
came forward and said she remembered selling a young man a pair of grey
suede gloves on the day of the murder. She was a woman of about forty
and she'd liked the look of him. He was particularly anxious that they
should match his grey suit and he wanted them rather large so that he
shouldn't have any difficulty in slipping into them. Berger was paraded
with a dozen other young men and she picked him out at once, but, as his
lawyer pointed out, that was easy since she had only just seen his
picture in the paper. Then they got hold of one of Berger's crooked
friends who said he'd met him on the night of the murder, not walking
towards the boulevard, but in a direction that would have taken him to
Jordan's apartment. He'd shaken hands with him and had noticed that he
was wearing gloves. But that particular witness was a thorough scamp. He
had a foul record, and Berger's counsel at the trial attacked him
violently. Berger denied that he had seen him on that particular evening
and his counsel tried to persuade the jury that it was a cooked-up story
that the man had invented in order to ingratiate himself with the
police. The damning thing was the trousers. There'd been a lot of stuff
in the papers about Berger's smart clothes, the well-dressed gangster
and all that sort of thing; you'd have thought, to read it, that he got
his suits in Savile Row and his haberdashery at Charvet's. The
prosecution was anxious to prove that he was in desperate need of money
and they went round to all the shops that supplied things both to him
and for the household to find out if there had been any pressure put to
settle unpaid accounts. But it appeared that everything bought for the
house was paid for on the nail and there were no outstanding debts. So
far as clothes were concerned, Berger, it turned out, had bought nothing
since he lost his job but one grey suit. The detective who was
interviewing the tailor asked when this had been paid for and the tailor
turned up his books. He was an advertising tailor in a large way of
business who made clothes to measure at a lowish price. It was then
discovered that Berger had ordered an extra pair of trousers with the
suit. The police had a list of every article in his wardrobe, and this
pair of trousers didn't figure on it. They at once saw the importance of
the fact and they made up their minds to keep it dark till the trial.

"It was a thrilling moment, believe me, when the prosecution introduced
the subject. There could be no doubt that Berger had had two pairs of
trousers to his new grey suit and that one of the pairs was missing.
When he was asked about it he never even attempted to explain. He didn't
seem flummoxed. He said he didn't know they were missing. He pointed out
that he had had no opportunity of going over his wardrobe for some
months, having been in prison awaiting trial, and when he was asked how
he could possibly account for their disappearance suggested flippantly
that perhaps one of the police officers who had searched the house was
in need of a pair of new trousers and had sneaked them. But Madame
Berger had her explanation pat, and I'm bound to say I thought it a very
ingenious one. She said that Lydia had been ironing the trousers, as she
always did after Robert had worn them, and the iron was too hot and she
had burnt them. He was fussy about his clothes and it had been something
of a struggle to find the money to pay for the suit, they knew he would
be angry with his wife, and Madame Berger, wishing to spare her his
reproaches and seeing how scared she was, proposed that they shouldn't
tell him; she would get rid of the trousers and Robert perhaps would
never notice that they had disappeared. Asked what she had done with
them she said that a tramp had come to the door, asking for money, and
she had given him the trousers instead. The size of the burn was gone
into. She claimed that it made the trousers unwearable, and when the
public prosecutor pointed out that invisible mending would have repaired
the damage, she answered that it would have cost more than the trousers
were worth. Then he suggested that in their impoverished circumstances
Berger might well have worn them in the house; it would surely have been
better to risk his displeasure than to throw away a garment which might
still be useful. Madame Berger said she never thought of that, she gave
them to the tramp on an impulse, to get rid of them. The prosecutor put
it to her that she had to get rid of them because they were
blood-stained and that she hadn't given them to a tramp who had so
conveniently presented himself, but had herself destroyed them. She
hotly denied this. Then where was the tramp? He would read of the
incident in the papers and knowing that a man's life was at stake would
surely present himself. She turned to the press, throwing out her arms
with a dramatic gesture.

"'Let all these gentlemen,' she cried, 'spread it far and wide. Let them
beseech him to come forward and save my son.'

"She was magnificent on the witness stand. The public prosecutor
subjected her to a merciless examination; she fought like a fury. He
took her through young Berger's life and she admitted all his misdeeds,
from the episode at the tennis club to his thefts from the broker who
after his conviction had, out of charity, given him another chance. She
took all the blame of them on herself. A French witness is allowed much
greater latitude than is allowed to a witness in an English criminal
trial, and with bitter self-reproach she confessed that his errors were
due to the indulgence with which she had brought him up. He was an only
child and she had spoilt him. Her husband had lost a leg in the war,
while attending to the wounded under fire, and his ill-health had made
it necessary for her to give him unremitting attention to the detriment
of her maternal duties. His untimely end had left the wretched boy
without guidance. She appealed to the emotions of the jury by dwelling
on the grief that had afflicted them both when death robbed their little
family of its head. Then her son had been her only consolation. She
described him as high-spirited, headstrong, easily led by bad
companions, but deeply affectionate and, whatever else he was guilty of,
incapable of murdering a man who had never shown him anything but
kindness.

"But somehow she didn't create a favourable impression. She insisted on
her own unimpeachable respectability in a way that grated on you. Even
though she was defending the son she adored she missed no opportunity to
remind the court that she was the daughter of a staff officer. She was
smartly dressed, in black, perhaps too smartly, she gave you the
impression of a woman who was trying to live above her station; and she
had a calculating expression on her hard, decided features; you couldn't
believe that she'd have given a crust of bread, much less a pair of
trousers, even though damaged, to a beggar."

"And Lydia?"

"Lydia was rather pathetic. She was very much in the family way. Her
face was swollen with tears and her voice hardly rose above a whisper,
so that you could only just hear what she said. No one believed her
story that she had broken the glass of the watch herself, but the
prosecutor wasn't hard on her as he'd been on her mother-in-law; she was
too obviously the innocent victim of a cruel fate. Madame Berger and
Robert had used her unmercifully for their own ends. The court took it
as natural enough that she should do everything in her power to save her
husband. It was even rather touching when she told how kind and sweet he
had always been to her. It was quite clear that she was madly in love
with him. The look she gave him when she came on to the witness stand
was very moving. Out of all that crowd of witnesses, policemen and
detectives, jailors, bar-loungers, informers, crooks, mental
experts--they called a couple of experts who had made a psychological
examination of Berger and a pretty picture they painted of his
character--out of all that crowd, I say, she was the only one who
appeared to have any human feeling.

"They'd got Matre Lemoine, one of the best criminal lawyers at the
French bar, to defend Berger; he was a very tall, thin man, with a long
sallow face, immense black eyes and very black, thick hair. He had the
most eloquent hands I've ever seen. He was a striking figure in his
black gown, with the white of his lawyer's bands under his chin. He had
a deep, powerful voice. He reminded you, I hardly know why, of one of
those mysterious figures in a Longhi picture. He was an actor as well as
an orator. By a look he could express his opinion of a man's character
and by a pause the improbability of his statements. I wish you could
have seen the skill with which he treated the hostile witnesses, the
suavity with which he inveigled them into contradicting themselves, the
scorn with which he exposed their baseness, the ridicule with which he
treated their pretensions. He could be winningly persuasive and brutally
harsh. When the mental experts deposed that on repeated examinations of
Berger in prison they had formed the opinion that he was vain, arrogant
and mendacious, ruthless, devoid of moral sense, unscrupulous and
insensible to remorse, he reasoned with them as though he were a trained
psychologist. It was a delight to watch the working of his subtle brain.
He spoke generally in an easy, conversational tone, but enriched by his
lovely voice and with a beautiful choice of words; you felt that
everything he said could have gone straight down in a book without
alteration; but when he came to his final speech and used all the
resources at his disposal the effect was stupendous. He insisted on the
flimsiness of the evidence; he poured contempt on the credibility of the
disreputable witnesses; he drew red herrings across the path; he
contended that the prosecution hadn't made out a case upon which it was
possible to convict. Now he was chatty and seemed to talk to the jury as
man to man, now he worked up to a flight of impassioned pleading and his
voice grew and grew in volume till it rang through the court-room like
the pealing of thunder. Then a pause so dramatic that you felt your skin
go all goosey. His peroration was magnificent. He told the jury that
they must do their duty and decide according to their conscience, but he
besought them to put out of their minds all the prejudice occasioned by
the young man's admitted crimes, and, his voice low and tremulous with
emotion--by God! it was effective, he reminded them that the man the
public prosecutor asked them to sentence to death was the son of a
widow, herself the daughter of a soldier who had deserved well of his
country, and the son of an officer who had given his life in its
defence; he reminded them that he was recently married, and had married
for love, and his young wife now bore in her womb the fruits of their
union. Could they let this innocent child be brought into the world with
the stigma that his father was a convicted murderer? Claptrap? Of course
it was claptrap, but if you'd been there and heard those thrilling,
grave accents you wouldn't have thought so. Gosh! how people cried. I
nearly did myself, only I saw the tears coursing down Berger's cheeks
and him wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, and that seemed to me so
comic that I kept my head. But it was a fine effort, and not all the
huissiers in the world could have prevented the applause that burst from
the crowd when he sat down.

"The prosecuting counsel was a stout, rubicund fellow of thirty-five, I
should say, or forty, who looked like a North Country farmer. He oozed
self-satisfaction. You felt that for him the case was a wonderful chance
to make a splash and so further his career. He was verbose and confused,
so that, if the presiding judge hadn't come to his help now and then,
the jury would hardly have known what he was getting at. He was cheaply
melodramatic. On one occasion he turned to Berger, who had just made
some remark aside to one of the warders who sat in the dock with him,
and said:

"'You may smile now, but you won't smile when, with your arms pinioned
behind your back, you walk in the cold grey light of dawn and see the
guillotine rear its horror before your eyes. No smile then will break on
your lips, but your limbs will shake with terror, and remorse for your
monstrous crime wring your heart.'

"Berger gave the warder an amused look, but so contemptuous of what the
public prosecutor had said that if he hadn't been eaten up with vanity
he couldn't have failed to be disconcerted. It was grand to see the way
Lemoine treated him. He paid him extravagant compliments, but charged
with such corrosive irony that, for all his conceit, the public
prosecutor couldn't help seeing he was made a fool of. Lemoine was so
malicious, but with such perfect courtesy and with such a condescending
urbanity, that you could see in the eyes of the presiding judge a
twinkle of appreciation. I very much doubt if the prosecuting counsel
advanced his career by his conduct of this case.

"The three judges sat in a row on the bench. They were rather impressive
in their scarlet robes and black squarish caps. Two were middle-aged men
and never opened their mouths. The presiding judge was a little old man,
with the wrinkled face of a monkey, and a tired, flat voice, but he was
very observant; he listened attentively, and when he spoke it was
without severity, but with a passionless calm that was rather
frightening. He had the exquisite reasonableness of a man who has no
illusions about human nature, but having long since learnt that man is
capable of any vileness accepts the fact as just as much a matter of
course as that he has two arms and two legs. When the jury went out to
consider their verdict we journalists scattered to have a chat, a drink
or a cup of coffee. We all hoped they wouldn't be too long, because it
was getting late and we wanted to get our stuff in. We had no doubt that
they'd find Berger guilty. One of the odd circumstances I've noticed in
the murder trials I've attended is how unlike the impression is you get
about things in court to that which you get by reading about them in the
paper. When you read the evidence, you think that after all it's rather
slight and if you'd been on the jury you'd have given the accused the
benefit of the doubt. But what you've left out of account is the general
atmosphere, the feeling that you get; it puts an entirely different
colour on the evidence. After about an hour we were told that the jury
had arrived at a decision and we trooped in again. Berger was brought up
from the cells and we all stood up as the three judges trailed in one
after the other. The lights had been lit and it was rather sinister in
that crowded court. There was a tremor of apprehension. Have you ever
been to the Old Bailey?"

"No, in point of fact, I haven't," said Charley.

"I go often when I'm in London. It's a good place to learn about human
nature. There's a difference in feeling between that and a French court
that made a most peculiar impression on me. I don't pretend to
understand it. At the Old Bailey you feel that a prisoner is confronted
with the majesty of the law. It's something impersonal that he has to
deal with, Justice in the abstract. An idea, in fact. It's awful in the
literal sense of the word. But in that French court, during the two days
I spent there, I was beset by a very different feeling: I didn't get the
impression that it was permeated by a grandiose abstraction, I felt that
the apparatus of law was an arrangement by which a bourgeois society
protected its safety, its property, its privileges from the evil-doer
who threatened them. I don't mean the trial wasn't fair or the verdict
unjustified, what I mean is that you got the sensation of a society that
was outraged because it feared, rather than of a principle that must be
upheld. The prisoner was up against men who wanted to safeguard
themselves, rather than, as with us, up against an idea that must
prevail though the heavens fall. It was terrifying rather than awful.
The verdict was guilty of murder with extenuating circumstances."

"What were the extenuating circumstances?"

"There were none, but French juries don't like to sentence a man to
death, and by French law when there are extenuating circumstances
capital punishment can't be inflicted. Berger got off with fifteen
years' penal servitude."

Simon looked at his watch and got up.

"I must be going. I'll give you the stuff I wrote about the trial and
you can read it at your leisure. And look, here's the article I wrote on
crime as a form of sport. I showed it to your girl friend, but I don't
think she liked it very much; anyhow, she returned it without a word of
comment. As an exercise in sardonic humour it's not so dusty."




                              CHAPTER VII


Since he had no wish to read Simon's articles in Lydia's presence,
Charley, on parting from his friend, went to the Dme, ordered himself a
cup of coffee, and settled himself down to their perusal. He was glad to
read a connected account of the murder and the trial, for Lydia's
various narratives had left him somewhat confused. She had told him this
and that, not in the order in which it had occurred, but as her emotion
dictated. Simon's three long articles were coherent, and though there
were particulars which Charley had learnt from Lydia and of which he was
ignorant, he had succeeded in constructing a graphic story which it was
easy to follow. He wrote almost as he spoke, in a fluent journalistic
style, but he had managed very effectively to present the background
against which the events he described had been enacted. You got a
sinister impression of a world, sordid, tumultuous, in which these
gangsters, dope traffickers, bookies and race-course touts lived their
dark and hazardous lives. Dregs of the population of a great city,
living on their wits, suspicious of one another, ready to betray their
best friend if it could be of advantage to themselves, open-handed,
sociable, gaily cynical, even good-humoured, they seemed to enjoy that
existence, with all its dangers and vicissitudes, which kept you up to
the mark and made you feel that you really were living. Each man's hand
was against his neighbours, but the alertness which this forced upon you
was exhilarating. It was a world in which a man would shoot another for
a trifle, but was just as ready to take flowers and fruit, bought at no
small sacrifice, to a third who was sick in hospital. The atmosphere
with which Simon had not unskilfully encompassed his story filled
Charley with a strange unease. The world he knew, the peaceful, happy
world of the surface, was like a pretty lake in which were reflected the
dappled clouds and the willows that grew on its bank, where care-free
boys paddled their canoes and the girls with them trailed their fingers
in the soft water. It was terrifying to think that below, just below,
dangerous weeds waved tentacles to ensnare you and all manner of
strange, horrible things, poisonous snakes, fish with murderous jaws,
waged an unceasing and hidden warfare. From a word here, a word there,
Charley got the impression that Simon had peered fascinated into those
secret depths, and he asked himself whether it was merely curiosity, or
some horrible attraction, that led him to observe those crooks and
blackguards with a cynical indulgence.

In this world Robert Berger had found himself wonderfully at home. Of a
higher class and better educated than most of its inhabitants, he had
enjoyed a certain prestige. His charm, his easy manner and his social
position attracted his associates, but at the same time put them on
their guard against him. They knew he was a crook, but curiously enough,
because he was a _garon de bonne famille_, a youth of respectable
parentage, took it somewhat amiss that he should be. He worked chiefly
alone, without confederates, and kept his own counsel. They had a notion
that he despised them, but they were impressed when he had been to a
concert and talked enthusiastically and, for all they could tell, with
knowledge of the performance. They did not realise that he felt himself
wonderfully at ease in their company. In his mother's house, with his
mother's friends, he felt lonely and oppressed; he was irritated by the
inactivity of the respectable life. After his conviction on the charge
of stealing a motor-car he had said to Jojo in one of his rare moments
of confidence:

"Now I needn't pretend any more. I wish my father were alive, he would
have turned me out of the house and then I should be free to lead the
only life I like. Evidently I can't leave my mother. I'm all she has."

"Crime doesn't pay," said Jojo.

"You seem to make a pretty good thing out of it," Robert laughed. "But
it's not the money, it's the excitement and the power. It's like diving
from a great height. The water looks terribly far away, but you make the
plunge, and when you rise to the surface, gosh! you feel pleased with
yourself."

Charley put the newspaper cuttings back in his pocket, and, his brow
slightly frowning with the effort, tried to piece together what he now
knew of Robert Berger in order to get some definite impression of the
sort of man he really was. It was all very well to say he was a
worthless scamp of whom society was well rid; that was true of course,
but it was too simple and too sweeping a judgment to be satisfactory;
the idea dawned in Charley's mind that perhaps men were more complicated
than he had imagined, and if you just said that a man was this or that
you couldn't get very far. There was Robert's passion for music,
especially Russian music, which, so unfortunately for her, had brought
Lydia and him together. Charley was very fond of music. He knew the
delight it gave him, the pleasure, partly sensual, partly intellectual,
when, intoxicated by the loveliness that assailed his ears, he remained
yet keenly appreciative of the subtlety with which the composer had
worked out his idea. Looking into himself, as perhaps he had never
looked before, to find out what exactly it was he felt when he listened
to one of the greater symphonies, it seemed to him that it was a complex
of emotions: excitement and at the same time peace, love for others and
a desire to do something for them, a wish to be good and a delight in
goodness, a pleasant languor and a funny detachment as though he were
floating above the world and whatever happened there didn't very much
matter; and perhaps if you had to combine all those feelings into one
and give it a name, the name you'd give it was happiness. But what was
it that Robert Berger got when he listened to music? Nothing like that,
that was obvious. Or was it unjust to dismiss such emotions as music
gave _him_ as vile and worthless? Might it not be rather that in music
he found release from the devil that possessed him, that devil which was
stronger than himself so that he neither could be delivered, nor even
wanted to be delivered, from the urge that drove him to crime because it
was the expression of his warped nature, because by throwing himself
into antagonism with the forces of law and order he realised his
personality--might it not be that in music he found peace from that
impelling force and for a while, resting in heavenly acquiescence, saw
as though through a rift in the clouds a vision of love and goodness?

Charley knew what it was to be in love. He knew that it made you feel
friendly to all men, he knew that you wanted to do everything in the
world for the girl you loved, he knew that you couldn't bear the thought
of hurting her and he knew that you couldn't help wondering what she saw
in you, because of course she was wonderful, definitely, and if you were
honest with yourself you were bound to confess that you couldn't hold a
candle to her. And Charley supposed that if he felt like that everyone
else must feel like that and therefore Robert Berger had too. There was
no doubt that he loved Lydia with passion, but if love filled him with a
sense of--Charley jibbed at the word that came to his mind, it made him
almost blush with embarrassment to think of it--well, with a sense of
holiness, it was strange that he could commit sordid and horrible
crimes. There must be two men in him. Charley was perplexed, which can
hardly be considered strange, for he was but twenty-three, and older,
wiser men have failed to understand how a scoundrel can love as purely
and disinterestedly as a saint. And was it possible for Lydia to love
her husband even now with an all-forgiving devotion if he were entirely
worthless?

"Human nature wants a bit of understanding," he muttered to himself.

Without knowing it, he had said a mouthful.

But when he came to consider the love that consumed Lydia, a love that
was the cause of her every action, the inspiration of her every thought,
so that it was like a symphonic accompaniment that gave depth and
significance to the melodic line which was her life from day to day, he
could only draw back in an almost horrified awe as he might have drawn
back, terrified but fascinated, at the sight of a forest on fire or a
river in flood. This was something with which his experience could not
cope. By the side of this he knew that his own little love affairs had
been but trivial flirtations, and the emotion which had from time to
time brought charm and gaiety into his somewhat humdrum life no more
than a boy's sentimentality. It was incomprehensible that in the body of
that commonplace, drab little woman there should be room for a passion
of such intensity. It was not only what she said that made you realise
it, you felt it, intuitively as it were, in the aloofness which, for all
the intimacy with which she treated you, kept you at a distance; you saw
it in the depths of her transparent eyes, in the scorn of her lips when
she didn't know you were looking at her, and you heard it in the
undertones of her sing-song voice. It was not like any of the civilised
feelings that Charley was familiar with, there was something wild and
brutal in it, and notwithstanding her high-heeled shoes, her silk
stockings, and her coat and skirt, Lydia did not seem a woman of to-day,
but a savage with elemental instincts, who still harboured in the
darkest recesses of her soul the ape-like creature from which the human
being is descended.

"By God! what have I let myself in for?" said Charley.

He turned to Simon's article. Simon had evidently taken pains over it,
for the style was more elegant than that of his reports of the trial. It
was an exercise in irony written with detachment, but beneath the
detachment you felt the troubled curiosity with which he had considered
the character of this man who was restrained neither by scruple nor by
the fear of consequences. It was a clever little essay, but so callous
that you could not read it without discomfort. Trying to make the most
of his ingenious theme, Simon had forgotten that human beings, with
feelings, were concerned; and if you smiled, for it was not lacking in a
bitter wit, it was with malaise. It appeared that Simon had somehow
gained admittance to the little house at Neuilly, and in order to give
an impression of the environment in which Berger had lived, he described
with acid humour the tasteless, stuffy and pretentious room into which
he had been ushered. It was furnished with two drawing-room suites, one
Louis Quinze and the other Empire. The Louis Quinze suite was in carved
wood, gilt, and covered in blue silk with little pink flowers on it; the
Empire suite was upholstered in light yellow satin. In the middle of the
room was an elaborately-carved gilt table with a marble top. Both suites
had evidently come from one of those shops in the Boulevard St. Antoine
that manufacture period furniture wholesale, and had been then bought at
auction when their first owners had wanted to get rid of them. With two
sofas and all those chairs it was impossible to move without precaution
and there was nowhere you could sit in comfort. On the walls were large
oil-paintings in heavy gold frames, which, it was obvious, had been
bought at sale-rooms because they were going for nothing.

The prosecution had reconstructed the story of the murder with
plausibility. It was evident that Jordan had taken a fancy to Robert
Berger. The meals he had stood him, the winners he had given him and the
money he had lent him proved that. At last Berger had consented to come
to his apartment, and so that their leaving the bar together should not
attract attention they had arranged for one to go some minutes after the
other. They met according to plan, and since the concierge was certain
she had admitted that night no one who asked for Jordan, it was plain
that they had entered the house together. Jordan lived on the ground
floor. Berger, still wearing his smart new gloves, sat down and smoked a
cigarette while Jordan busied himself getting the whisky and soda and
bringing in the cake from his tiny kitchen. He was the sort of man who
always sat in his shirt-sleeves at home, and he took off his coat. He
put on a record. It was a cheap, old-fashioned gramophone, without an
automatic change, and it was while Jordan was putting on a new record
that Berger, coming up behind him as though to see what it was, had
stabbed him in the back. To claim, as the defence did, that he had not
the strength to give a blow of such violence as the post-mortem
indicated, was absurd. He was very wiry. Persons who had known him in
his tennis days testified that he had been known for the power of his
forehand drive. If he had never got into the first rank it was not due
to an inadequate physique, but to some psychological failing that
defeated his will to win.

Simon accepted the view of the prosecution. He thought they had got the
facts pretty accurately, and that the reason they gave for Jordan's
asking the young man to come to his apartment was correct, but he was
convinced they were wrong in supposing that Berger had murdered him for
the money he knew he had made during the day. For one thing, the
purchase of the gloves showed that he had decided upon the deed before
he knew that Jordan would be in possession that night of an unusually
large sum. Though the money had never been found, Simon was persuaded
that he had taken it, but that was by the way; it was there for the
taking and he was glad enough to get it, but to do so was not the motive
of the murder. The police claimed that he had stolen between fifty and
sixty cars; he had never even attempted to sell one of them; he
abandoned them sometimes after a few hours, at the most after a few
days. He purloined them for the convenience of having one when he needed
it, but much more to exercise his daring and resource. His robberies
from women, by means of the simple trick he had devised, brought him
little profit; they were practical jokes that appealed to his sense of
humour. To carry them out required the charm which he loved to exert. It
made him giggle to think of those women left speechless and gaping in an
empty street while he sped on. The thing was, in short, a form of sport,
and each time he had successfully brought it off he was filled with the
self-satisfaction that he might have felt when by a clever lob or by a
drop shot he won a point off an opponent at tennis. It gave him
confidence. And it was the risk, the coolness that was needed, the power
to make a quick decision if it looked as though discovery were
inevitable, much more than the large profits, that had induced him to
engage in the business of smuggling dope into France. It was like
rock-climbing; you had to be sure of foot, you had to keep your head;
your life depended on your nerve, your strength, your instinct; but when
you had surmounted every difficulty and achieved your aim, how wonderful
after that terrific strain was the feeling of deliverance and how
intoxicating the sense of victory! Certainly for a man of his slender
means he had got a good deal of money out of the broker who had employed
him; but it had come in driblets and he had spent it on taking Lydia to
night clubs and for excursions in the country, or with his friends at
Jojo's Bar. Every penny had gone by the time he was caught; and it was
only a chance that he was; the method he had conceived for robbing his
employer was so adroit that he might very well have got away with it
indefinitely. Here again it looked as though it were much more for the
fun of the thing, than for profit, that he had committed a crime. He
told his lawyer quite frankly that the broker was so confident of his
own cleverness, he could not resist making a fool of him.

But by now, Simon went on, pursuing his idea, Robert Berger had
exhausted the amusement he was capable of getting out of the smaller
varieties of evil-doing. During one of the periods he spent in jail
awaiting trial he had made friends with an old lag, and had listened to
his stories with fascinated interest. The man was a cat-burglar who
specialised in jewellery and he made an exciting tale of some of his
exploits. First there was the marking down of the prey, then the patient
watching to discover her habits, the examination of the premises; you
had to find out not only where the jewels were kept and how to get into
the house, but also what were the chances of making a quick get-away if
necessary; and after you had made sure of everything there was the long
waiting for the suitable opportunity. Often months elapsed between the
time when you made up your mind to go after the stuff and the time when
at last you had a whack at it. That was what choked Berger off; he had
the nerve, the agility and the presence of mind that were needed, but he
would never have had the patience for the complicated business that must
precede the burglary.

Simon likened Robert Berger to a man who has shot partridge and pheasant
for years, and having ceased to find diversion in the exercise of his
skill, craves for a sport in which there is an element of danger and so
turns his mind to big game. No one could say when Berger began to be
obsessed with the idea of murder, but it might be supposed that it took
possession of him gradually. Like an artist heavy with the work
demanding expression in his soul, who knows that he will not find peace
till he has delivered himself of the burden, Berger felt that by killing
he would fulfil himself. After that, having expressed his personality to
its utmost, he would be at rest and then could settle down with Lydia to
a life of humdrum respectability. His instincts would have been
satisfied. He knew that it was a monstrous crime, he knew that he risked
his neck, but it was the monstrousness of it that tempted him and the
risk that made it worth the attempt.

Here Charley put the article down. He thought that Simon was really
going too far. He could just fancy himself committing murder in a moment
of ungovernable rage, but by no effort of imagination could he conceive
of anyone doing such a thing--doing it not even for money, but for sport
as Simon put it--because he was driven to it by an urge to destroy and
so assert his own being. Did Simon really believe there was anything in
his theory, or was it merely that he thought it would make an effective
article? Charley, though with a slight frown on his handsome face, went
on reading.

Perhaps, Simon continued, Robert Berger would have been satisfied merely
to toy with the idea if circumstances had not offered him the
predestined victim. He may often, when drinking with one of his boon
companions, have considered the feasibility of killing him and put the
notion aside because the difficulties were too great or detection too
certain. But when chance threw him in contact with Teddie Jordan he must
have felt that here was the very man he had been looking for. He was a
foreigner, with a large acquaintance but no close friends, who lived
alone in a blind alley. He was a crook; he was connected with the dope
traffic; if he were found dead one day the police might well suppose
that his murder was the result of a gangsters' quarrel. If they knew
nothing of his sexual habits, they would be sure to find out about them
after his death and likely enough to assume that he had been killed by
some rough who wanted more money than he was prepared to give. Among the
vast number of bullies, blackmailers, dope peddlers and bad hats who
might have done him in, the police would not know where to look, and in
any case he was an undesirable alien and they would think he was just as
well out of the way. They would make enquiries and if results were not
soon obtained quietly shelve the case. Berger saw that Jordan had taken
a fancy to him and he played him like an angler playing a trout. He made
dates which he broke. He made half-promises which he did not keep. If
Jordan, thinking he was being made a fool of, threatened to break away,
he exercised his charm to induce him to have patience. Jordan thought it
was he who pursued and the other who fled. Berger laughed in his sleeve.
He tracked him as a hunter day after day tracks a shy and suspicious
beast in the jungle, waiting for his opportunity, with the knowledge
that, for all its instinctive caution, the brute will at last be
delivered into his hands. And because Berger had no feeling of animosity
for Jordan, neither liking him nor disliking him, he was able to devote
himself without hindrance to the pleasure of the chase. When at length
the deed was done and the little bookmaker lay dead at his feet, he felt
neither fear not remorse, but only a thrill so intense that he was
transported.

Charley finished the essay. He shuddered. He did not know whether it was
Robert Berger's brutal treachery and callousness that more horrified him
or the cool relish with which Simon described the workings of the
murderer's depraved and tortuous mind. It was true that this description
was the work of his own invention, but what fearful instinct was it in
him that found delight in peering into such vile depths? Simon leaned
over to look into Berger's soul, as one might lean over the edge of a
fearful precipice, and you had the impression that what he saw filled
him with envy. Charley did not know how he had got the impression
(because there was nothing in those careful periods or in that
half-flippant irony actually to suggest it) that while he wrote he asked
himself whether there was in him, Simon Fenimore, the courage and the
daring to do a deed so shocking, cruel and futile. Charley sighed.

"I've known Simon for nearly fifteen years. I thought I knew him inside
out. I'm beginning to think I don't know the first thing about him."

But he smiled happily. There were his father and his mother and Patsy.
They would be leaving the Terry-Masons' next day, tired after those
strenuous days of fun and laughter, but glad to get back to their
bright, artistic and comfortable house.

"Thank God, they're decent, ordinary people. You know where you are with
them."

He suddenly felt a wave of affection for them sweep over him.

But it was growing late; Lydia would be getting back and he did not want
to keep her waiting, she would be lonely, poor thing, by herself in that
sordid room; he stuffed the essay into his pocket with the other
cuttings and walked back to the hotel. He need not have fashed himself.
Lydia was not there. He took _Mansfield Park_, which with Blake's Poems
was the only book he had brought with him, and began to read. It was a
delight to move in the company of those well-mannered persons who after
the lapse of more than a hundred years seemed as much alive as anyone
you met to-day. There was a gracious ease in the ordered course of their
lives, and the perturbations from which they suffered were not so
serious as to distress you. It was true that Cinderella was an awful
little prig and Prince Charming a monstrous pedant; it was true that you
could not but wish that instead of setting her prim heart on such an owl
she had accepted the proposals of the engaging and witty villain; but
you accepted with indulgence Jane Austen's determination to reward good
sense and punish levity. Nothing could lessen the delight of her gentle
irony and caustic humour. It took Charley's mind off that story of
depravity and crime in which he seemed to have got so strangely
involved. He was removed from the dingy, cheerless room and in fancy saw
himself sitting on a lawn, under a great cedar, on a pleasant summer
evening; and from the fields beyond the garden came the scent of hay.
But he began to feel hungry and looked at his watch. It was half-past
eight. Lydia had not returned. Perhaps she had no intention of doing so?
It wouldn't be very nice of her to leave him like that, without a word
of explanation or farewell, and the possibility made him rather angry,
but then he shrugged his shoulders.

"If she doesn't want to come back, let her stay away."

He didn't see why he should wait any longer, so he went out to dinner,
leaving word at the porter's desk where he was going, so that if she
came she could join him. Charley wasn't quite sure if it amused,
flattered or irritated him, that the staff should treat him with a sort
of confidential familiarity as though they got a vicarious satisfaction
out of the affair which, naturally enough, they were convinced he was
having. The porter was smilingly benevolent and the young woman at the
cashier's desk excited and curious. Charley chuckled at the thought of
their shocked surprise if they had known how innocent were his relations
with Lydia. He came back from his solitary dinner and she was not yet
there. He went up to his room and went on reading, but now he had to
make a certain effort to attend. If she didn't come back by twelve he
made up his mind to give her up and go out on the loose. It was absurd
to spend the best part of a week in Paris and not have a bit of fun. But
soon after eleven she opened the door and entered, carrying a small and
very shabby suitcase.

"Oh, I'm tired," she said. "I've brought a few things with me. I'll just
have a wash and then we'll go out to dinner."

"Haven't you dined? I have."

"Have you?"

She seemed surprised.

"It's past eleven."

She laughed.

"How English you are! Must you always dine at the same hour?"

"I was hungry," he answered rather stiffly.

It seemed to him that she really might express some regret for having
kept him waiting so long. It was plain, however, that nothing was
farther from her thoughts.

"Oh, well, it doesn't matter, I don't want any dinner. What a day I've
had! Alexey was drunk; he had a row with Paul this morning, because he
didn't come home last night, and Paul knocked him down. Evgenia was
crying, and she kept on saying: 'God has punished us for our sins. I
have lived to see my son strike his father. What is going to happen to
us all?' Alexey was crying too. 'It is the end of everything,' he said.
'Children no longer respect their parents. Oh, Russia, Russia!'"

Charley felt inclined to giggle, but he saw that Lydia was taking the
scene in all seriousness.

"And did you cry too?"

"Naturally," she answered, with a certain coldness.

She had changed her dress and now wore one of black silk. It was plain
enough but well cut. It suited her. It made her clear skin more delicate
and deepened the colour of her blue eyes. She wore a black hat, rather
saucy in shape, with a feather in it, and much more becoming than the
old black felt. The smarter clothes had had an effect on her; she wore
them more elegantly and carried herself with a graceful assurance. She
no longer looked like a shop-girl, but like a young woman of some
distinction, and prettier than Charley had ever seen her, but she gave
you less than ever the impression that there was anything doing, as the
phrase goes; if she had given before the effect of a respectable
work-girl who knew how to take care of herself, she gave now that of a
modish young woman perfectly capable of putting a too enterprising young
man in his place.

"You've got a different frock on," said Charley, who was already
beginning to get over his ill-humour.

"Yes, it's the only nice one I've got. I thought it was too humiliating
for you to have to be seen with such a little drab as I was looking.
After all, the least a handsome young man in beautiful clothes can ask
is that when he goes into a restaurant with a woman people shouldn't
say: How can he go about with a slut who looks as though she were
wearing the cast-off clothes of a maid of all work? I must at least try
to be a credit to you."

Charley laughed. There was really something rather likeable about her.

"Well, we'd better go out and get you something to eat. I'll sit with
you. If I know anything about your appetite you could eat a horse."

They started off in high spirits. He drank a whisky and soda and smoked
his pipe while Lydia ate a dozen oysters, a beefsteak and some fried
potatoes. She told him at greater length of her visit to her Russian
friends. She was greatly concerned at their situation. There was no
money except the little the children earned. One of these days Paul
would get sick of doing his share and would disappear into that
equivocal night life of Paris, to end up, if he was lucky, when he had
lost his youth and looks, as a waiter in a disreputable hotel. Alexey
was growing more and more of a soak and even if by chance he got a job
would never be able to hold it. Evgenia had no longer the courage to
withstand the difficulties that beset her; she had lost heart. There was
no hope for any of them.

"You see, it's twenty years since they left Russia. For a long time they
thought there'd be a change there and they'd go back, but now they know
there's no chance. It's been hard on people like that, the revolution;
they've got nothing to do now, they and all their generation, but to
die."

But it occurred to Lydia that Charley could not be much interested in
people whom he had not even seen. She could not know that while she was
talking to him about her friends he was telling himself uneasily that,
if he guessed aright what was in Simon's mind, it was just such a fate
that he was preparing for him, for his father, mother and sister, and
for their friends. Lydia changed the subject.

"And what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon? Did you go
and see any pictures?"

"No. I went to see Simon."

Lydia was looking at him with an expression of indulgent interest, but
when he answered her question, she frowned.

"I don't like your friend Simon," she said. "What is it that you see in
him?"

"I've known him since I was a kid. We were at school together and at
Cambridge. He's been my friend always. Why don't you like him?"

"He's cold, calculating and inhuman."

"I think you're wrong there. No one knows better than I do that he's
capable of great affection. He's a lonely creature. I think he hankers
for a love that he can never arouse."

Lydia's eyes shone with mockery, but, as ever, there was in it a rueful
note.

"You're very sentimental. How can anyone expect to arouse love who isn't
prepared to give himself? In spite of all the years you've known him I
wonder if you know him as well as I do. He comes a lot to the Srail; he
doesn't often go up with a girl, and then not from desire, but from
curiosity. Madame makes him welcome, partly because he's a journalist
and she likes to keep in with the press, and partly because he sometimes
brings foreigners who drink a lot of champagne. He likes to talk to us
and it never enters his head that we find him repulsive."

"Remember that if he knew that he wouldn't be offended. He'd only be
curious to know why. He has no vanity."

Lydia went on as though Charley had said nothing.

"He hardly looks upon us as human beings, he despises us and yet he
seeks our company. He's at ease with us. I think he feels that our
degradation is so great, he can be himself, whereas in the outside world
he must always wear a mask. He's strangely insensitive. He thinks he can
permit himself anything with us and he asks us questions that put us to
shame and never sees how bitterly he wounds us."

Charley was silent. He knew well enough how Simon, with his insatiable
curiosity, could cause people profound embarrassment and was only
surprised and scornful when he found that they resented his enquiries.
He was willing enough to display the nakedness of his soul and it never
occurred to him that the reserves of others could be due, not to
stupidity as he thought, but to modesty. Lydia continued:

"Yet he's capable of doing things that you'd never expect of him. One of
our girls was suddenly taken ill. The doctor said she must be operated
on at once, and Simon took her to a nursing home himself so that she
shouldn't have to go to the hospital, and paid for the operation; and
when she got better he paid her expenses to go away to a convalescent
home. And he'd never even slept with her."

"I'm not surprised. He attaches no importance to money. Anyhow it shows
you that he's capable of a disinterested action."

"Or do you think he wanted to examine in himself what the emotion of
goodness exactly was?"

Charley laughed.

"It's obvious that you haven't got much use for poor Simon."

"He's talked to me a great deal. He wanted to find out all I could tell
him about the Russian Revolution, and he wanted me to take him to see
Alexey and Evgenia so that he could ask them. You know he reported
Robert's trial. He tried to make me tell him all sorts of things that he
wanted to know. He went to bed with me because he thought he could get
me to tell him more. He wrote an article about it. All that pain, all
that horror and disgrace, were no more to him than an occasion to string
clever, flippant words together; and he gave it me to read to see how I
would take it. I shall never forgive him that. Never."

Charley sighed. He knew that Simon, with his amazing insensitiveness to
other people's feelings, had shown her that cruel essay with no
intention of hurting, but from a perfectly honest desire to see how she
reacted to it and to discover how far her intimate knowledge would
confirm his fanciful theory.

"He's a strange creature," said Charley. "I dare say he has a lot of
traits which one would rather he hadn't, but he has great qualities.
There's one thing at all events that you can say about him: if he
doesn't spare others, he doesn't spare himself. After not seeing him for
two years, and he's changed a lot in that time, I can't help finding his
personality rather impressive."

"Frightening, I should have said."

Charley moved uneasily on his plush seat, for that also, somewhat to his
dismay, was what he had found it.

"He lives an extraordinary life, you know. He works sixteen hours a day.
The squalor and discomfort of his surroundings are indescribable. He's
trained himself to eat only one meal a day."

"What is the object of that?"

"He wants to strengthen and deepen his character. He wants to make
himself independent of circumstances. He wants to prepare himself for
the rle he expects one day to be called upon to play."

"And has he told you what that rle is?"

"Not precisely."

"Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?"

"No."

"Simon has talked to me about him a great deal. Alexey was a lawyer in
the old days, a clever one with liberal principles, and he defended
Dzerjinsky at one of his trials. That didn't prevent Dzerjinsky from
having Alexey arrested as a counter-revolutionary and sending him for
three years to Alexandrovsk. That was one of the reasons why Simon
wanted me so much to take him to see Alexey. And when I wouldn't,
because I couldn't bear that he should see to what depths that poor,
broken-down man had sunk, he charged me with questions to put to him."

"But who was Dzerjinsky?" asked Charley.

"He was the head of the Cheka. He was the real master of Russia. He had
an unlimited power over the life and death of the whole population. He
was monstrously cruel; he imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands upon
thousands of people. At first I thought it strange that Simon should be
so interested in that abominable man, he seemed to be fascinated by him,
and then I guessed the reason. That is the rle he means to play when
the revolution he's working for takes place. He knows that the man who
is master of the police is master of the country."

Charley's eyes twinkled.

"You make my flesh creep, dear. But, you know, England isn't like
Russia; I think Simon will have to wait a hell of a long time before
he's dictator of England."

But this was a matter upon which Lydia could brook no flippancy. She
gave him a dark look.

"He's prepared to wait. Didn't Lenin wait? Do you still think the
English are made of different clay from other men? Do you think the
proletariat, which is growing increasingly conscious of its power, is
going to leave the class you belong to indefinitely in possession of its
privileges? Do you think that a war, whether it results in your defeat
or your victory, is going to result in anything but a great social
upheaval?"

Charley was not interested in politics. Though, like his father, of
liberal views, with mildly socialistic tendencies so long as they were
not carried beyond the limits of prudence, by which, though he didn't
know it, he meant so long as they didn't interfere with his comfort and
his income, he was quite prepared to leave the affairs of the country to
those whose business it was to deal with them; but he could not let
these provocative questions of Lydia's go without an answer.

"You talk as though we did nothing for the working classes. You don't
seem to know that in the last fifty years their condition has changed
out of all recognition. They work fewer hours than they did and get
higher wages for what they do. They have better houses to live in. Why,
on our own estate we're doing away with slums as quickly as it's
economically possible. We've given them old age pensions and we provide
them with enough to live on when they're out of work. They get free
schooling, free hospitals, and now we're beginning to give them holidays
with pay. I really don't think the British working man has much to
complain of."

"You must remember that the views of a benefactor and the views of a
beneficiary on the value of a benefaction are apt to differ. Do you
really expect the working man to be grateful to you for the advantages
he's extracted from you at the point of a pistol? Do you think he
doesn't know that he owes the favours you've conferred on him to your
fear rather than to your generosity?"

Charley was not going to let himself be drawn into a political
discussion if he could help it, but there was one more thing he couldn't
refrain from saying.

"I shouldn't have thought that the condition in which you and your
Russian friends now find yourselves would lead you to believe that
mob-rule was a great success."

"That is the bitterest part of our tragedy. However much we may deny it,
we know in our hearts that whatever has happened to us, we've deserved
it."

Lydia said this with a tragic intensity that somewhat disconcerted
Charley. She was a difficult woman; she could take nothing lightly. She
was the sort of woman who couldn't even ask you to pass the salt without
giving you the impression that it was no laughing matter. Charley
sighed; he supposed he must make allowances, for she had had a rotten
deal, poor thing; but was the future really so black?

"Tell me about Dzerjinsky," he said, stumbling a little over the
pronunciation of the difficult name.

"I can only tell you what Alexey has told me. He says the most
remarkable thing about him was the power of his eyes; he had a curious
gift, he was able to fix them upon you for an immensely long time, and
the glassy stare of them, with their dilated pupils, was simply
terrifying. He was extremely thin, he'd contracted tuberculosis in
prison, and he was tall; not bad-looking, with good features. He was
absolutely single-minded, that was the secret of his power; he had a
cold, arid temperament; I don't suppose he'd ever given himself up with
a whole heart to a moment's pleasure. The only thing he cared about was
his work; he worked day and night. At the height of his career he lived
in one small room with nothing in it but a desk and an old screen, and
behind the screen a narrow iron bed. They say that in the year of
famine, when they brought him decent food instead of horseflesh, he sent
it away, demanding the same rations as were given to the other workers
in the Cheka. He lived for the Cheka and nothing else. There was no
humanity in him, neither pity nor love, only fanaticism and hatred. He
was terrible and implacable."

Charley shuddered a little. He could not but see why Lydia had told him
about the terrorist, and in truth it was startling to note how close the
resemblance was between the sinister man she had described and the man
he had so surprisingly discovered that Simon was become. There was the
same asceticism, the same indifference to the pleasant things of life,
the same power of work, and perhaps the same ruthlessness. Charley
smiled his good-natured smile.

"I dare say Simon has his faults like the rest of us. One has to be
tolerant with him because he hasn't had a very happy or a very easy
life. I think perhaps he craves for affection, and there's something
that people find repellent in his personality which prevents him from
getting it. He's frightfully sensitive and things which wouldn't affect
ordinary people wound him to the quick. But at heart I think he's kind
and generous."

"You're deceived in him. You think he has your own good nature and
unselfish consideration. I tell you, he's dangerous. Dzerjinsky was the
narrow idealist who for the sake of his ideal could bring destruction
upon his country without a qualm. Simon isn't even that. He has no
heart, no conscience, no scruple, and if the occasion arises he will
sacrifice you who are his dearest friend without hesitation and without
remorse."




                              CHAPTER VIII


They woke next day at what was for them an early hour. They had
breakfast in bed, each with his tray, and after breakfast, while
Charley, smoking his pipe, read the _Mail_, Lydia, a cigarette between
her lips, did her hands. You would have thought, to see them, each
engaged on his respective occupation, that they were a young married
couple whose first passion had dwindled into an easy friendship. Lydia
painted her nails and spread out her fingers on the sheet to let them
dry. She gave Charley a mischievous glance.

"Would you like to go to the Louvre this morning? You came to Paris to
see pictures, didn't you?"

"I suppose I did."

"Well, let's get up, then, and go."

When the maid who brought them their coffee drew the curtains the day
that filtered into the room from the courtyard had looked as grey and
bleak as on the mornings that had gone before; and they were surprised,
on stepping into the street, to see that the weather had suddenly
changed. It was cold still, but the sun was bright and the clouds, high
up in the heavens, were white and shining. The air had a frosty bite
that made your blood tingle.

"Let's walk," said Lydia.

In that gay, quivering light the Rue de Rennes lost its dinginess, and
the grey, shabby houses no longer wore the down-at-heel, despondent air
they usually do, but had a mellow friendliness as though, like old women
in reduced circumstances, they felt less forlorn now that the unexpected
sunshine smiled on them as familiarly as on the grand new buildings on
the other side of the river. When they crossed the Place St.
Germain-des-Prs and there was a confusion of buses and trams,
recklessly-speeding taxis, lorries and private cars, Lydia took
Charley's arm; and like lovers, or a grocer and his wife taking a walk
of a Sunday afternoon, they sauntered arm-in-arm, stopping now and then
to look into the window of a picture dealer, down the narrow Rue de
Seine. Then they came on to the quay. Here the Paris day burst upon them
in all its winter beauty and Charley gave a little exclamation of
delight.

"You like this?" smiled Lydia.

"It's a picture by Raffaelli." He remembered a line in a poem that he
had read at Tours: "_Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui._"

The air had a sparkle so that you felt you could take it up in your
hands and let it run through your fingers like the water of a fountain.
To Charley's eyes, accustomed to the misty distances and soft haze of
London, it seemed amazingly transparent. It outlined the buildings, the
bridge, the parapet by the side of the river, with an elegant
distinctness, but the lines, as though drawn by a sensitive hand, were
tender and gracious. Tender too was the colour, the colour of sky and
cloud, the colour of stone; they were the colours of the
eighteenth-century pastelists; and the leafless trees, their slim
branches a faint mauve against the blue, repeated with exquisite variety
a pattern of delicate intricacy. Because he had seen pictures of just
that scene Charley was able to take it in, without any sense of
surprise, but with a loving, understanding recognition; its beauty did
not shatter him by its strangeness, nor perplex him by its
unexpectedness, but filled him with a sense of familiar joy such as a
countryman might feel when after an absence of years he sees once more
the dear, straggling street of his native village.

"Isn't it lovely to be alive?" he cried.

"It's lovely to be as young and enthusiastic as you are," said Lydia,
giving his arm a little squeeze, and if she choked down a sob he did not
notice it.

Charley knew the Louvre well, for every time his parents spent a few
days in Paris (to let Venetia get her clothes from the little dressmaker
who was just as good as those expensive places in the Rue Royale and the
Rue Cambon) they made a point of taking their children there. Leslie
Mason made no bones at confessing that he preferred new pictures to old.

"But after all, it's part of a gentleman's education to have done the
great galleries of Europe, and when people talk about Rembrandt and
Titian and so on, you look a bit of a fool if you can't put your word
in. And I don't mind telling you that you couldn't have a better guide
than your mother. She's very artistic, and she knows what's what, and
she won't waste your time over a lot of tripe."

"I don't claim that your grandfather was a great artist," said Mrs.
Mason, with the modest self-assurance of someone who is without conceit
aware that he knows his subject, "but he knew what was good. All I know
about art he taught me."

"Of course you had a flair," said her husband.

Mrs. Mason considered this for a moment.

"Yes, I suppose you're right, Leslie. I had a flair."

What made it easier to do the Louvre with expedition and spiritual
profit was that in those days they had not rearranged it, and the Salon
Carr contained most of the pictures which Mrs. Mason thought worthy of
her children's attention. When they entered that room they walked
straight to Leonardo's _Gioconda_.

"I always think one ought to look at that first," she said. "It puts you
in the right mood for the Louvre."

The four of them stood in front of the picture and with reverence gazed
at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman. After a
decent interval for meditation Mrs. Mason turned to her husband and her
two children. There were tears in her eyes.

"Words fail me to express what that picture always makes me feel," she
said, with a sigh. "Leonardo was a Great Artist. I think everybody's
bound to acknowledge that."

"I don't mind admitting that I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to
Old Masters," said Leslie, "but that's got a _je ne sais quoi_ that gets
you, there's no denying that. Can you remember that bit of Pater's,
Venetia? He hit the nail on the head and no mistake."

Mrs. Mason, a faint, enigmatic smile on her lips, in a low but thrilling
voice repeated the celebrated lines that two generations ago wrought
such havoc on the sthetic young.

"Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions."

They listened to her in awed silence. She broke off, and in her natural
voice said brightly:

"Now let's go and look at the Raphael."

But it was impossible to avoid seeing the two vast canvases of Paolo
Veronese that faced one another on opposite walls.

"It's worth while giving them a glance," she said. "Your grandfather had
a very high opinion of them. Of course Veronese was neither subtle nor
profound. He had no soul. But he certainly had a gift of composition,
and you must remember that there's no one now who could arrange so great
a number of figures in a harmonious, and yet natural, design. You must
admire them if for no other reason because of their vitality and for the
sheer physical vigour Veronese must have had to paint such enormous
pictures. But I think there's more in them than that. They do give you
an impression of the abundant, multicoloured life of the period and of
the pleasure-loving, pagan spirit which was characteristic of patrician
Venice in the heyday of its glory."

"I've often tried to count the number of figures in the _Marriage of
Cana_," said Leslie Mason, "but every time I make it different."

The four of them began to count, but none of the results they reached
agreed. Presently they strolled into the Grande Galerie.

"Now here is _L'Homme au Gant_," said Mrs. Mason. "I'm not sorry you
looked at the Veroneses first, because they do bring out very clearly
the peculiar merit of Titian. You remember what I said about Veronese
having no soul; well, you've only got to look at _L'Homme au Gant_ to
see that soul is just what Titian had."

"He was a remarkable old buffer," said Leslie Mason. "He lived to the
age of ninety-nine and then it needed the plague to kill him."

Mrs. Mason smiled slightly.

"I have no hesitation," she continued, "in saying that I consider this
one of the finest portraits that's ever been painted. Of course one
can't compare it with a portrait by Czanne or even by Manet."

"We mustn't forget to show them the Manet, Venetia."

"No, we won't do that. We'll come to that presently. But what I mean to
say is that you must accept the idiom of the time at which it was
painted, and bearing that in mind I don't think anyone can deny that
it's a masterpiece. Of course just as a piece of painting it's beyond
praise, but it's got a distinction and an imaginative quality which are
very unique. Don't you think so, Leslie?"

"Definitely."

"When I was a girl I used to spend hours looking at it. It's a picture
that makes you dream. Personally I think it's a finer portrait than
Velasquez's Pope, the one in Rome, you know, just because it's more
suggestive. Velasquez was a very great painter, I admit that, and he had
an enormous influence on Manet, but what I miss in him is exactly what
Titian had--Soul."

Leslie Mason looked at his watch.

"We mustn't waste too much time here, Venetia," he said, "or we shall be
late for lunch."

"All right. We'll just go and look at the Ingres and the Manet."

They walked on, glancing right and left at the pictures that lined the
walls, but there was nothing that Mrs. Mason thought worth lingering
over.

"It's no good burdening their minds with a lot of impressions that'll
only confuse them," she told her husband. "It's much better that they
should concentrate on what's really important."

"Definitely," he answered.

They entered the Salle des tats, but at the threshold Mrs. Mason
stopped.

"We won't bother about the Poussins to-day," she said. "You have to come
to the Louvre to see them, and there's no doubt that he was a Great
Artist. But he was more of a painter's painter than a layman's, and I
think you're a little young to appreciate him. One day when you're both
of you a bit older we'll come and have a good go at him. I mean you have
to be rather sophisticated to thoroughly understand him. The room that
we're coming to now is nineteenth century. But I don't think we need
bother about Delacroix either. He was a painter's painter too, and I
wouldn't expect you to see in him what I do; you must take my word for
it that he was a very considerable artist. He was no mean colourist and
he had a strong romantic feeling. And you certainly needn't trouble your
heads with the Barbizon School. In my young days they were very much
admired, but that was before we understood the Impressionists even, and
of course we hadn't so much as heard of Czanne or Matisse; they don't
amount to anything and they can be safely ignored. I want you to look
first at the _Odalisque_ of Ingres and then at the _Olympia_ of Manet.
They're wonderfully placed, opposite one another, so that you can look
at both of them at the same time, compare them and draw your own
conclusions."

Having said this, Mrs. Mason advanced into the room with her husband by
her side, while Charley and Patsy followed together a step or two
behind. But her eyes falling on Millet's _The Gleaners_, she paused.

"I'd just like you to look at this for a minute. I don't want you to
admire it, but I want you to give it a glance because at one time it was
thought very highly of. I'm ashamed to say that when I was a girl it
used to bring tears to my eyes. I thought it a very beautiful and moving
picture. But when I look at it now I simply can't think what I ever saw
in it. It just shows how one's opinions change as one grows older."

"It shows also how even the youngest of us may err," said Leslie, with a
shrewd smile, as though he had just invented the phrase.

They turned away and presently Venetia reached the exact spot where she
thought the two pictures which she particularly wanted her offspring to
admire could be seen to best advantage. She stopped with the triumphant
air with which a conjurer extracts a rabbit from a hat and cried:

"There!"

They stood in a row for some minutes and Mrs. Mason gazed at the two
nudes with rapture. Then she turned to the children.

"Now let's go and examine them close at hand."

They stood in front of the _Odalisque_.

"It's no good, Venetia," said Leslie. "You may say I'm a philistine, but
I don't like the colour. The pink of that body is just the pink of that
face cream you used to put on at night till I made you stop it."

"You needn't reveal the secrets of the alcove to these innocent
children," said Venetia with a prim and at the same time roguish smile.
"But I would never claim for a moment that Ingres was a great colourist;
all the same I do think that blue is a very sweet colour and I've often
thought I'd like an evening dress just like it. D'you think it would be
too young, Patsy?"

"No, darling. Not a bit."

"But that's neither here nor there. Ingres was probably the greatest
draughtsman who ever lived. I don't know how anyone can look at those
firm and lovely lines and not feel he's in the presence of one of the
great manifestations of the human spirit. I remember my father telling
me that once he came here with one of his fellow students from Julian's
who'd never seen it, and when his eyes fell on it he was so overcome
with its beauty of line that he actually fainted."

"I think it's much more likely that it was long past the hour at which
reasonable people have lunch and that he fainted with hunger."

"Isn't your father awful?" smiled Mrs. Mason. "Well, let's just have
five minutes more for the _Olympia_, Leslie, and then I'm ready to go."

They marched up to Manet's great picture.

"When you come to a masterpiece like this," said Mrs. Mason, "you can do
nothing but keep your mouth shut and admire. The rest, as Hamlet said,
is silence. No one, not even Renoir, not even El Greco, has ever painted
flesh like that. Look at that right breast. It's a miracle of
loveliness. One is simply left gasping. Even my poor father, who
couldn't bear the moderns, was forced to admit that the painting of that
breast was pretty good. Pretty good? I ask you. Now I suppose you see a
black line all round the figure. You do, Charley, don't you?"

Charley acknowledged that he did.

"And you, Patsy?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't," she cried triumphantly. "I used to see it, I know it's
there, but I give you my word, I don't see it any more."

After that they went to lunch at one of the little places Mr. and Mrs.
Mason had discovered where no English ever went. It was just as good as
the fashionable restaurants foreigners went to and half the price. It
was fairly full and, oddly enough, there were English people at the
table on the right of theirs and Americans on the left. Opposite sat two
tall blond Swedes and a little way off some Japanese. In fact you heard
almost every language but French. Leslie gave the company a sweeping
glance of disapproval.

"It looks to me, Venetia, as though this place is getting spoilt."

The four of them were given huge menus written in violet ink and they
looked at them in some perplexity. Leslie rubbed his hands cheerfully.

"Now what are we going to start on? I suppose in France we'd better do
as the French do, so what do you all say to snails to begin with and
frogs to follow?"

"Don't be disgusting, Daddy," said Patsy.

"You're merely showing your ignorance when you say that, my child.
They're a great delicacy. I don't see them on the bill of fare." He
could never quite remember whether in French _grenouille_ was a frog and
_crapaud_ a toad or the other way about; he looked up at the head-waiter
who was standing beside him and in his sturdy British accent said:
"_Garong, est-ce-quer vous avez des crapauds?_"

The head-waiter didn't much like being addressed as _garong_, but he
gravely answered that it was not the season.

"How sickening," cried Leslie. "Well, what about snails? _Escargots?_"

"Daddy, I shall be sick if you eat snails."

"He's only teasing you, darling," said Mrs. Mason. "I think we'd better
have a nice omelette. You can always be sure of an omelette in France."

"That's true," said Leslie. "No matter where you go in France you can be
sure of getting a good omelette. Very well. _Garong, une omelette pour
quatre._"

Then, for the sake of the children, they ordered _rosbif  l'anglaise_.
The young people had vanilla ice-cream after that while their parents
had camembert. They often had it in England, but they agreed that
somehow or other it tasted quite different in France. They ended up with
an infusion of chicory, and as she sipped it with relish Mrs. Mason
said:

"You have to come to France to know what coffee really tastes like."

Through his long-standing acquaintance with the famous gallery and the
useful information he had acquired from his mother, Charley, with Lydia
by his side, entered the Salon Carr now with something of the
confidence of a good tennis player stepping on to the court. He was
eager to show Lydia his favourite pictures and ready to explain to her
exactly what was admirable in them. It was, however, something of a
surprise to discover that the room had been rearranged and the
_Gioconda_, to which he would naturally have taken her first, was
nowhere to be seen. They spent but ten minutes there. When Charley went
with his parents it took them an hour to do that room and even then, his
mother said, they hadn't exhausted its treasures. But _L'Homme au Gant_
was in its old place and he gently led her up to it. They looked at it
for a while.

"Stunning, isn't it?" he said then, giving her arm an affectionate
pressure.

"Yes, it's all right. What business is it of yours?"

Charley turned his head sharply. No one had ever asked him a question
like that about a picture before.

"What on earth d'you mean? It's one of the great portraits of the world.
Titian, you know."

"I dare say. But what's it got to do with you?"

Charley didn't quite know what to say.

"Well, it's a very fine picture and it's beautifully painted. Of course
it doesn't tell a story, if that's what you mean."

"No, I don't," she smiled.

"I don't suppose it's got anything to do with me really."

"Then why should you bother about it?"

Lydia moved on and Charley followed her. She gave other pictures an
indifferent glance. Charley was troubled by what she had said and he
puzzled his brains to discover what could be at the back of her mind.
She gave him an amused smile.

"Come," she said. "I'll show you some pictures."

She took his arm and they walked on. Suddenly he caught sight of the
_Gioconda_.

"There she is," he cried. "I must stop and have a good look at that. I
make a point of it when I come to the Louvre."

"Why?"

"Hang it all, it's Leonardo's most celebrated picture. It's one of the
most important pictures in the world."

"Important to you?"

Charley was beginning to find her a trifle irritating; he couldn't make
out what she was getting at; but he was a good-humoured youth, and he
wasn't going to lose his temper.

"A picture may be important even if it isn't very important to me."

"But it's only you who count. So far as you're concerned the only
meaning a picture has is the meaning it has for you."

"That seems an awfully conceited way of looking at it."

"Does that picture say anything to you really?"

"Of course it does. It says all sorts of things, but I don't suppose I
could put them any better than Pater did. Unfortunately I haven't got my
mother's memory. She can repeat the whole passage by heart."

But even as he spoke he recognised that his answer was lame. He was
beginning to have a vague inkling of what Lydia meant, and then the
uneasy feeling came to him that there was something in art that he'd
never been told about. But he fortunately remembered what his mother had
said about Manet's _Olympia_.

"In point of fact I don't know why you should say anything about a
picture at all. You either like it or you don't."

"And you really like that one?" she asked in a tone of mild
interrogation.

"Very much."

"Why?"

He thought for a moment.

"Well, you see, I've known it practically all my life."

"That's why you like your friend Simon, isn't it?" she smiled.

He felt it was an unfair retort.

"All right. You take me and show me the pictures you like."

The position was reversed. It was not he, as he had expected, who was
leading the way and with such information as would add interest to the
respective canvases, sympathetically drawing her attention to the great
masterpieces he had always cared for; but it was she who was conducting
him. Very well. He was quite ready to put himself in her hands and see
what it was all about.

"Of course," he said to himself, "she's Russian. One has to make
allowances for that."

They trudged past acres of canvas, through one room after another, for
Lydia had some difficulty in finding her way; but finally she stopped
him in front of a small picture that you might easily have missed if you
had not been looking for it.

"Chardin," he said. "Yes, I've seen that before."

"But have you ever looked at it?"

"Oh yes. Chardin wasn't half a bad painter in his way. My mother thinks
a lot of him. I've always rather liked his still lifes myself."

"Is that all it means to you? It breaks my heart."

"That?" cried Charley with astonishment. "A loaf of bread and a flagon
of wine? Of course it's very well painted."

"Yes, you're right; it's very well painted; it's painted with pity and
love. It's not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it's the bread
of life and the blood of Christ, but not held back from those who starve
and thirst for them and doled out by priests on stated occasions; it's
the daily fare of suffering men and women. It's so humble, so natural,
so friendly; it's the bread and wine of the poor who ask no more than
that they should be left in peace, allowed to work and eat their simple
food in freedom. It's the cry of the despised and rejected. It tells you
that whatever their sins men at heart are good. That loaf of bread and
that flagon of wine are symbols of the joys and sorrows of the meek and
lowly. They ask for your mercy and your affection; they tell you that
they're of the same flesh and blood as you. They tell you that life is
short and hard and the grave is cold and lonely. It's not only a loaf of
bread and a flagon of wine; it's the mystery of man's lot on earth, his
craving for a little friendship and a little love, the humility of his
resignation when he sees that even they must be denied him."

Lydia's voice was tremulous and now the tears flowed from her eyes. She
brushed them away impatiently.

"And isn't it wonderful that with those simple objects, with his
painter's exquisite sensibility, moved by the charity in his heart, that
funny, dear old man should have made something so beautiful that it
breaks you? It was as though, unconsciously perhaps, hardly knowing what
he was doing, he wanted to show you that if you only have enough love,
if you only have enough sympathy, out of pain and distress and
unkindness, out of all the evil of the world, you can create beauty."

She was silent and for long stood looking at the little picture. Charley
looked at it too, but with perplexity. It was a very good picture; he
hadn't really given it more than a glance before, and he was glad Lydia
had drawn his attention to it; in some odd way it was rather moving; but
of course he could never have seen in it all she saw. Strange, unstable
woman! It was rather embarrassing that she should cry in a public
gallery; they did put you in an awkward position, these Russians; but
who would have thought a picture could affect anyone like that? He
remembered his mother's story of how a student friend of his
grandfather's had fainted when he first saw the _Odalisque_ of Ingres;
but that was away back in the nineteenth century, they were very
romantic and emotional in those days. Lydia turned to him with a sunny
smile on her lips. It disconcerted him to see with what suddenness she
could go from tears to laughter.

"Shall we go now?" she said.

"But don't you want to see any more pictures?"

"Why? I've seen one. I feel happy and peaceful. What could I get if I
saw another?"

"Oh, all right."

It seemed a very odd way of doing a picture gallery. After all, they
hadn't looked at the Watteaus or the Fragonards. His mother was bound to
ask him if he'd seen the _Embarkation for Cythera_. Someone had told her
they'd cleaned it and she'd want to know how the colours had come out.

They did a little shopping and then lunched at a restaurant on the quay
on the other side of the river and Lydia, as usual, ate with a very good
appetite. She liked the crowd that surrounded them and the traffic that
passed noisily in the roadway. She was in a good humour. It was as
though the violent emotion from which she had suffered had rinsed her
spirit clean, and she talked of trivial things with a pleasant
cheerfulness. But Charley was thoughtful. He did not find it so easy to
dismiss the disquietude that affected him. She did not usually notice
his moods, but the trouble of his mind was so clearly reflected on his
face that at last she could not but be struck by it.

"Why are you so silent?" she asked him, with a kindly, sympathetic
smile.

"I was thinking. You see, I've been interested in art all my life. My
parents are very artistic, I mean some people might even say they were
rather highbrow, and they were always keen on my sister and me having a
real appreciation of art; and I think we have. It rather worries me to
think that with all the pains I've taken, and the advantages I've had, I
don't seem really to know so much about it as you do."

"But I know nothing about art," she laughed.

"But you do seem to feel about it very strongly, and I suppose art is
really a matter of feeling. It's not as though I didn't like pictures. I
get an enormous kick out of them."

"You mustn't be worried. It's very natural that you should look at
pictures differently from me. You're young and healthy, happy and
prosperous. You're not stupid. They're a pleasure to you among a lot of
other pleasures. It gives you a feeling of warmth and satisfaction to
look at them. To walk through a gallery is a very agreeable way of
passing an idle hour. What more can you want? But, you see, I've always
been poor, often hungry, and sometimes terribly lonely. They've been
riches to me, food and drink and company. When I was working and my
employer had nagged me to distraction I used to slip into the Louvre at
the luncheon hour and her scolding didn't matter any more. And when my
mother died and I had nobody left, it comforted me. During those long
months when Robert was in prison before the trial and I was pregnant, I
think I should have gone mad and killed myself if it hadn't been that I
could go there, where nobody knew me and nobody stared at me, and be
alone with my friends. It was rest and peace. It gave me courage. It
wasn't so much the great well-known masterpieces that helped me, it was
the smaller, shyer pictures that no one noticed, and I felt they were
pleased that I looked at them. I felt that nothing really mattered so
very much, because everything passed. Patience! Patience! That's what I
learnt there. And I felt that, above all the horror and misery and
cruelty of the world, there was something that helped you to bear it,
something that was greater and more important than all that, the spirit
of man and the beauty he created. Is it really strange that that little
picture I showed you this morning should mean so much to me?"

To make the most of the fine weather they walked up the busy Boulevard
St. Michel and when they got to the top turned into the gardens of the
Luxembourg. They sat down and, talking little, idly watched the nurses,
no longer, alas, wearing the long satin streamers of a generation ago,
trundling prams, the old ladies in black who walked with sober gait in
charge of little children, and the elderly gentlemen, with thick scarves
up to their noses, who paced up and down immersed in thought; with
friendly hearts they looked at the long-legged boys and girls who ran
about playing games, and when a pair of young students passed wondered
what it was they so earnestly discussed. It seemed not a public park,
but a private garden for the people on the Left Bank, and the scene had
a moving intimacy. But the chilly rays of the waning sun gave it withal
a certain melancholy, for within the iron grille that separated it from
the bustle of the great city the garden had a singular air of unreality,
and you had a feeling that those old people who trod the gravel paths,
those children whose cries made a cheerful hubbub, were ghosts taking
phantom walks or playing phantom games, who at dusk would dissolve, like
the smoke of a cigarette, into the oncoming darkness. It was growing
very cold, and Charley and Lydia wandered back, silent friendly
companions, to the hotel.

When they got to their room Lydia took out of her suitcase a thin sheaf
of piano pieces.

"I brought some of the things Robert used to play. I play so badly and
we haven't got a piano at Alexey's. D'you think you could play them?"

Charley looked at the music. It was Russian. Some of the pieces were
familiar to him.

"I think so," he said.

"There's a piano downstairs and there'll be nobody in the salon now.
Let's go down."

The piano badly wanted tuning. It was an upright. The keyboard was
yellow with age and because it was seldom played on the notes were
stiff. There was a long music-stool and Lydia sat down by Charley's
side. He put on the rack a piece by Scriabin that he knew and after a
few resounding chords to try the instrument began to play. Lydia
followed the score and turned the pages for him. Charley had had as good
masters as could be found in London, and he had worked hard. He had
played at concerts at school and afterwards at Cambridge, so that he had
acquired confidence. He had a light, pleasant touch. He enjoyed playing.

"There," he said when he came to the end of the piece.

He was not displeased with himself. He knew that he had played it
according to the composer's intention and with the clear, neat
straightforwardness that he liked in piano-playing.

"Play something else," said Lydia.

She chose a piece. It was an arrangement for the piano of folk songs and
folk dances by a composer of whom Charley had never heard. It startled
him to see the name of Robert Berger written in a firm, bold hand on the
cover. Lydia stared at it in silence and then turned the page. He looked
at the music he was about to play and wondered what Lydia was thinking
now. She must have sat by Robert's side just as she was sitting by his.
Why did she want to torture herself by making him play those pieces that
must recall to her bitter memories of her short happiness and the misery
that followed it?

"Well, begin."

He played well at sight and the music was not difficult. He thought he
acquitted himself of his task without discredit. Having struck the last
chord he waited for a word of praise.

"You played it very nicely," said Lydia, "but where does Russia come
in?"

"What exactly d'you mean by that?" he asked, somewhat affronted.

"You play it as if it was about a Sunday afternoon in London with people
in their best clothes walking around those great empty squares and
wishing it was time for tea. But that's not what it is at all. It's the
old, old song of peasants who lament the shortness and the hardness of
their life, it's the wide fields of golden corn and the labour of
gathering in the harvest, it's the great forest of beech trees, and the
nostalgia of the workers for an age when peace and plenty reigned on the
earth, and it's the wild dance that for a brief period brings them
forgetfulness of their lot."

"Well, you play it better."

"I can't play," she answered, but she edged him along the bench and took
his seat.

He listened. She played badly, but, for all that, got something out of
the music that he hadn't seen in it. She managed, though at a price, to
bring out the tumult of its emotion and the bitterness of its
melancholy; and she infused the dance rhythms with a barbaric vitality
that stirred the blood. But Charley was put out.

"I must confess I don't see why you should think you get the Russian
atmosphere better by playing false notes and keeping your foot firmly on
the loud pedal," he said acidly, when she finished.

She burst out laughing and flinging both her arms round his neck kissed
him on the cheeks.

"You are a sweet," she cried.

"It's very nice of you to say so," he answered coldly, disengaging
himself.

"Have I offended you?"

"Not at all."

She shook her head and smiled at him with soft tenderness.

"You play very well and your technique is excellent, but it's no good
thinking you can play Russian music; you can't. Play me some Schumann.
I'm sure you can."

"No, I'm not going to play any more."

"If you're angry with me, why don't you hit me?"

Charley couldn't help chuckling.

"You fool. It never occurred to me. Besides, I'm not angry."

"You're so big and strong and handsome, I forget that you're only a
young boy." She sighed. "And you're so unprepared for life. Sometimes
when I look at you I get such a pang."

"Now don't get all Russian and emotional."

"Be nice to me and play some Schumann."

When Lydia liked she could be very persuasive. With a diffident smile
Charley resumed his seat. Schumann, in point of fact, was the composer
he liked best and he knew a great deal by heart. He played to her for an
hour, and whenever he wanted to stop she urged him to go on. The young
woman at the cashier's desk was curious to see who was playing the piano
and peeped in. When she went back to her counter she murmured to the
porter with an arch and meaning smile:

"The turtle-doves are having a good time."

When at last Charley stopped, Lydia gave a little sigh of contentment.

"I knew that was the music to suit you. It's like you, healthy and
comfortable and wholesome. There's fresh air in it and sunshine and the
delicious scent of pine trees. It's done me good to listen to it and
it's done me good to be with you. Your mother must love you very much."

"Oh, come off it."

"Why are you so good to me? I'm tiresome, dull and exasperating. You
don't even like me very much, do you?"

Charley considered this for a moment.

"Well, I don't very much, to tell you the truth."

She laughed.

"Then why do you bother about me? Why don't you just turn me out into
the street?"

"I can't imagine."

"Shall I tell you? Goodness. Just pure, simply stupid goodness."

"Go to hell."

They dined in the Quarter. It had not escaped Charley's notice that
Lydia took no interest in him as an individual. She accepted him as you
might accept a person with whom you find yourself on a ship for a few
days and so forced to a certain intimacy, but it does not matter to you
where he came from and what sort of a man he is; he emerged from
non-existence when he stepped on board and will return to it when, on
reaching port, you part company with him. Charley was modest enough not
to be piqued by this, for he could not but realise that her own troubles
and perplexities were so great that they must absorb her attention; and
he was not a little surprised now when she led him to talk about
himself. He told her of his artistic inclinations and of the wish he had
so long harboured to be an artist, and she approved his commonsense
which in the end had persuaded him to prefer the assured life of a
business man. He had never seen her more cheerful and more human.
Knowing English domestic life only through Dickens, Thackeray and H. G.
Wells, she was curious to hear how existence was pursued in those
prosperous, sober houses in Bayswater that she knew but from their
outside. She asked him about his home and his family. These were
subjects on which he was always glad to talk. He spoke of his father and
mother with a faintly mocking irony which Lydia saw well enough he
assumed only to conceal the loving admiration with which he regarded
them. Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an
affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of
moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and
undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their
security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was
healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely
material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither
ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by
their neighbours according to their lights; and there was in them
neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good-nature,
their kindliness, their not unpleasing self-complacency depended on the
long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had
given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building
castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a
tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.

"How lucky you English are," she said.

But Charley was a trifle surprised at the impression his own words made
on him. In the course of his recital he had for the first time seen
himself from the standpoint of an observer. Until now, like an actor who
says his lines but, never having seen the play from the front, has but a
vague idea of what it is all about, he had played his part without
asking himself whether it had any meaning. It would be too much to say
that it made him uneasy, it slightly perplexed him, to realise that
while they were all, his father, his mother, his sister, himself, busy
from morning till night, so that the days were not long enough for what
they wanted to do; yet when you came to look upon the life they led from
one year's end to another it gave you an uncomfortable feeling that
they, none of them, did anything at all. It was like one of those
comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the
dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an
agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it.

When they had finished dinner they took a taxi to a cinema on the other
side of the river. It was a film of the Marx brothers and they rocked
with laughter at the extravagant humour of the marvellous clowns; but
they laughed not only at Groucho's wise-cracks and at Harpo's comic
quandaries, they laughed at one another's laughter. The picture finished
at midnight, but Charley was too excited to go quietly to bed and he
asked Lydia if she would come with him to some place where they could
dance.

"Where would you like to go?" asked Lydia. "Montmartre?"

"Wherever you like as long as it's gay." And then, remembering his
parents' constant, but seldom achieved, desire when they came to Paris:
"Where there aren't a lot of English people."

Lydia gave him the slightly mischievous smile that he had seen on her
lips once or twice before. It surprised him, but at the same time was
sympathetic to him. It surprised him because it went so strangely with
what he thought he knew of her character; and it was sympathetic to him
because it suggested that, for all her tragic history, there was in her
a vein of high spirits and of a rather pleasing, teasing malice.

"I'll take you somewhere. It won't be gay, but it may be interesting.
There's a Russian woman who sings there."

They drove a long way, and when they stopped Charley saw that they were
on the quay. The twin towers of Notre-Dame were distinct against the
frosty, starry night. They walked a few steps up a dark street and then
went through a narrow door; they descended a flight of stairs, and
Charley, to his astonishment, found himself in a large cellar with stone
walls; from these jutted out wooden tables large enough to accommodate
ten or twelve persons, and there were wooden benches on each side of
them. The heat was stifling and the air grey with smoke. In the space
left by the tables a dense throng was dancing to a melancholy tune. A
slatternly waiter in shirt-sleeves found them two places and took their
order. People sitting here and there looked at them curiously and
whispered to one another; and indeed Charley in his well-cut English
blue serge, Lydia in her black silk and her smart hat with the feather
in it, contrasted violently with the rest of the company. The men wore
neither collars nor ties, and they danced with their caps on, the end of
a cigarette stuck to their lips. The women were bare-headed and
extravagantly painted.

"They look pretty tough," said Charley.

"They are. Most of them have been in jug and those that haven't should
be. If there's a row and they start throwing glasses or pulling knives,
just stand against the wall and don't move."

"I don't think they much like the look of us," said Charley. "We seem to
be attracting a good deal of attention."

"They think we're sightseers and that always puts their backs up. But
it'll be all right. I know the _patron_."

When the waiter brought the two beers they had ordered Lydia asked him
to get the landlord along. In a moment he came, a big fellow with the
naked look of a fat priest, and immediately recognised Lydia. He gave
Charley a shrewd, suspicious stare, but when Lydia introduced him as a
friend of hers, shook hands with him warmly and said he was glad to see
him. He sat down and for a few minutes talked with Lydia in an
undertone. Charley noticed that their neighbours watched the scene and
he caught one man giving another a wink. They were evidently satisfied
that it was all right. The dance came to an end and the other occupants
of the table at which they sat came back. They gave the strangers
hostile looks, but the _patron_ explained that they were friends,
whereupon one of the party, a sinister-looking chap, with the scar of a
razor-wound on his face, insisted on offering them a glass of wine. Soon
they were all talking merrily together. They were plainly eager to make
the young Englishman at home, and a man sitting by his side explained to
him that though the company looked a bit rough they were all good
fellows with their hearts in the right place. He was a little drunk.
Charley, having got over his first uneasiness, began to enjoy himself.

Presently the saxophone player got up and advanced his chair. The
Russian singer of whom Lydia had spoken came forward with a guitar in
her hand and sat down. There was a burst of applause.

"_C'est La Marishka_," said Charley's drunken friend, "there's no one
like her. She was the mistress of one of the commissars, but Stalin had
him shot, and if she hadn't managed to get out of Russia he'd have shot
her too."

A woman on the other side of the table overheard him.

"What nonsense you're telling him, Loulou," she cried. "La Marishka was
the mistress of a grand duke before the revolution, everyone knows that,
and she had diamonds worth millions, but the Bolsheviks took everything
from her. She escaped disguised as a peasant."

La Marishka was a woman of forty, haggard and sombre, with gaunt,
masculine features, a brown skin, and enormous, blazing eyes under
black, heavy, arching brows. In a raucous voice, at the top of her
lungs, she sang a wild, joyless song, and though Charley could not
understand the Russian words a cold feeling ran down his spine. She was
loudly applauded. Then she sang a sentimental ballad in French, the
lament of a girl for her lover who was to be executed next morning,
which roused her audience to frenzy. She finished, for the time being,
with another Russian song, lively this time, and her face lost its
tragic cast; it took on a look of rude and brutal gaiety, and her voice,
deep and harsh, acquired a rollicking quality; your blood was stirred
and you could not but exult, but at the same time you were moved, for
below the bacchanalian merriment was the desolation of futile tears.
Charley looked at Lydia and caught her mocking glance. He smiled
good-naturedly. That grim woman got something out of the music which he
was conscious now was beyond his reach. Another burst of applause
greeted the end of the number, but La Marishka, as though she did not
hear it, without a sign of acknowledgment, rose from her chair and came
over to Lydia. The two women began to talk in Russian. Lydia turned to
Charley.

"She'll have a glass of champagne if you'll offer it to her."

"Of course."

He signalled to a waiter and ordered a bottle; then, with a glance at
the half-dozen people sitting at the table, changed his order.

"Two bottles and some glasses. Perhaps these gentlemen and ladies will
allow me to offer them a glass too."

There was a murmur of polite acceptance. The wine was brought and
Charley filled a number of glasses and passed them down the table. There
was a great deal of health-drinking and clinking of glasses together.

"_Vive l'Entente Cordiale._"

"_A nos allis._"

They all got very friendly and merry. Charley was having a grand time.
But he had come to dance, and when the orchestra began once more to play
he pulled Lydia to her feet. The floor was soon crowded and he noticed
that a lot of curious eyes were fixed upon her; he guessed that it had
spread through the company who she was; it made her to those bullies and
their women, somewhat to Charley's embarrassment, an object of interest,
but she did not seem even to be aware that anyone looked at her.

Presently the _patron_ touched her on the shoulder.

"I have a word to say to you," he muttered.

Lydia released herself from Charley's arms and going to one side with
the fat landlord listened to what he said. Charley could see that she
was startled. He was evidently trying to point someone out to her, for
Charley saw her craning her neck; but with the thick mass of dancers in
the way she could see nothing, and in a moment she followed the _patron_
to the other end of the long cellar. She seemed to have forgotten
Charley. Somewhat piqued, he went back to his table. Two couples were
sitting there comfortably enjoying his champagne, and they greeted him
heartily. They were all very familiar now and they asked him what he had
done with his little friend. He told them what had happened. One of the
men was a short thick-set fellow with a red face and a magnificent
moustache. His shirt open at the neck showed his hairy chest, and his
arms, for he had taken off his coat in that stifling heat and turned up
his shirt-sleeves, were profusely tattooed. He was with a girl who might
have been twenty years younger than he. She had very sleek black hair,
parted in the middle, with a bun on her neck, a face dead-white with
powder, scarlet lips and eyes heavy with mascara. The man nudged her
with his elbow.

"Now then, why don't you dance with the Englishman? You've drunk his
bubbly, haven't you?"

"I don't mind," she said.

She danced clingingly. She smelt strongly of scent, but not so strongly
as to disguise the fact that she had eaten at dinner a dish highly
flavoured with garlic. She smiled alluringly at Charley.

"He must be rotten with vice, this pretty little Englishman," she
gurgled, with a squirm of a lithe body in her black, but dusty, velvet
gown.

"Why do you say that?" he smiled.

"To be with the wife of Berger, what's that if it isn't vice?"

"She's my sister," said Charley gaily.

She thought this such a good joke that when the band stopped and they
went back to the table she repeated it to the assembled company. They
all thought it very funny, and the thick-set man with the hairy chest
slapped him on the back.

"_Farceur, va!_"

Charley was not displeased to be looked upon as a humorist. It was nice
to be a success. He realised that as the lover of a notorious murderer's
wife he was something of a personage there. They urged him to come
again.

"But come alone next time," said the girl he had just danced with.

"We'll find you a girl. What d'you want to get mixed up with one of the
Russians for? The wine of the country, that's what you want."

Charley ordered another bottle of champagne. He was far from tight, but
he was merry. He was seeing life with a vengeance. When Lydia came back
he was talking and laughing with his new friends as if he had known them
all his life. He danced the next dance with her. He noticed that she was
not keeping step with him and he gave her a little shake.

"You're not attending."

She laughed.

"I'm sorry. I'm tired. Let's go."

"Has something happened to upset you?"

"No. It's getting very late and the heat's awful."

Having warmly shaken hands with their new friends, they left and got
into a taxi. Lydia sank back exhausted. He was feeling happy and
affectionate and he took her hand and held it. They drove in silence.

They went to bed, and in a few minutes Charley became aware from her
regular breathing that Lydia had fallen asleep. But he was too excited
to sleep. The evening had amused him and he was keenly alert. He thought
it all over for a while and chuckled at the grand story he would make of
it when he got home. He turned on the light to read. But he could not
give his attention to the poems of Blake just then. Disordered notions
flitted across his mind. He switched off the light and presently fell
into a light doze, but in a little while awoke. He was tingling with
desire. He heard the quiet breathing of the sleeping woman in the bed by
his side and a peculiar sensation stirred his heart. Except on that
first evening at the Srail no feeling for Lydia had touched him except
pity and kindliness. Sexually she did not in the least attract him.
After seeing her for several days all day long he did not even think her
pretty; he did not like the squareness of her face, her high
cheek-bones, and the way her pale eyes were set flat in their orbits;
sometimes, indeed, he thought her really plain. Notwithstanding the life
she had adopted--for what strange, unnatural reason--she gave him a
sense of such deadly respectability that it choked him off. And then her
indifference to sexual congress was chilling. She looked with contempt
and loathing on the men who for money sought their pleasure of her. The
passionate love she bore for Robert gave her an aloofness from all human
affections that killed desire. But, besides all that, Charley didn't
think he liked her very much for herself; she was sometimes sullen,
almost always indifferent; she took whatever he did for her as her
right; it was all very well to say that she asked for nothing, it would
have been graceful if she had shown, not gratitude, but a glimmering
recognition of the fact that he was trying to do his best for her.
Charley had an uneasy fear that she was making a mug of him; if what
Simon said was true and she was making money at the brothel in order to
help Robert to escape, she was nothing but a callous liar; he flushed
hotly when it occurred to him that she was laughing behind his back at
his simplicity. No, he didn't admire her, and the more he thought of her
the less he thought he liked her. And yet at that moment he was so
breathless with desire of her that he felt he would choke. He thought of
her not as he saw her every day, rather drab, like a teacher at a Sunday
school, but as he had first seen her in those baggy Turkish trousers and
the blue turban spangled with little stars, her cheeks painted and her
lashes black with mascara; he thought of her slender waist, her clear,
soft, honey-coloured skin, and her small firm breasts with their rosy
nipples. He tossed on his bed. His desire now was uncontrollable. It was
anguish. After all, it wasn't fair; he was young and strong and normal;
why shouldn't he have a bit of fun when he had the chance? She was there
for that, she'd said so herself. What did it matter if she thought him a
dirty swine? He'd done pretty well by her, he deserved something in
return. The faint sound of her quiet breathing was strangely exciting
and it quickened his own. He thought of the feel of her soft lips when
he pressed his mouth to hers and the feel of her little breasts when he
took them in his hands; he thought of the feel of her lissom body in his
arms and the feel of his long legs lying against hers. He put on the
light, thinking it might wake her, and got out of bed. He leaned over
her. She lay on her back, her hands crossed over her breast like a stone
figure on a tomb; tears were running out of her closed eyes and her
mouth was distorted with grief. She was crying in her sleep. She looked
like a child, lying there, and her face had a child's look of hopeless
misery, for a child does not know that sorrow, like all other things,
will pass. Charley gave a gasp. The unhappiness of that sleeping woman
was intolerable to see, and all his passion, all his desire were
extinguished by the pity that overcame him. She had been gay during the
day, easy to talk to and companionable, and it had seemed to him that
she was free, at least for a while, from the pain that, he was
conscious, lurked always in the depths of her being; but in sleep it had
returned to her and he knew only too well what unhappy dreams distraught
her. He gave a deep sigh.

But he felt more disinclined for sleep than ever, and he could not bear
the thought of getting into bed again. He turned the shade down so that
the light should not disturb Lydia, and going to the table filled his
pipe and lit it. He drew the heavy curtain that was over the window and
sitting down looked out into the court. It was in darkness but for one
lighted window, and this had a sinister look. He wondered whether
someone lay ill in that room or, simply sleepless like himself, brooded
over the perplexity of life. Or perhaps some man had brought a woman in
and, their lust appeased, they lay contented in one another's arms.
Charley smoked. He felt dull and flat. He did not think of anything in
particular. At last he went back to bed and fell asleep.




                               CHAPTER IX


Charley was awakened by the maid bringing in the morning coffee. For a
moment he forgot the events of the previous night.

"Oh, I was sleeping so soundly," he said, rubbing his eyes.

"I'm sorry, but it's half-past ten and I have an engagement at
eleven-thirty."

"It doesn't matter. It's my last day in Paris and it would be silly to
waste it in sleep."

The maid had brought the two breakfasts on one tray and Lydia told her
to give it to Charley. She put on a dressing-gown and sat down at the
end of his bed, leaning against the foot. She poured out a cup of
coffee, cut a roll in two and buttered it for him.

"I've been watching you sleep," she said. "It's nice; you sleep like an
animal or a child, so deep, so quiet, it rests one just to look at you."

Then he remembered.

"I'm afraid you didn't have a very good night."

"Oh yes, I did. I slept like a top. I was tired out, you know. That's
one of the things I'm most grateful to you for, I've had such wonderful
nights. I dream terribly. But since I've been here I haven't dreamt
once; I've slept quite peacefully. And I who thought I should never
sleep like that again."

He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her
dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forbore to look at her. It
gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a
vivid, lacerating life could go on when one was sunk in unconsciousness,
a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and
twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no
recollection behind. An uncomfortable thought crossed his mind. He could
not quite make it explicit, but had he been able to, he would perhaps
have asked himself:

"Who are we really? What do we know about ourselves? And that other life
of ours, is that less real than this one?"

It was all very strange and complicated. It looked as though nothing
were quite so simple as it seemed; it looked as though the people we
thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn't even know
themselves. Charley had a sudden inkling that human beings were
infinitely mysterious. The fact was that you knew nothing about anybody.

"What's this engagement you've got?" he asked, more for the sake of
saying something than because he wanted to know.

Lydia lit a cigarette before she answered.

"Marcel, the fat man who runs the place we were at last night,
introduced me to two men there and I've made an appointment to meet them
at the Palette this morning. We couldn't talk in all that crowd."

"Oh!"

He was too discreet to ask who they were.

"Marcel's in touch with Cayenne and St. Laurent. He often gets news.
That's why I wanted to go there. They landed at St. Nazaire last week."

"Who? The two men? Are they escaped convicts?"

"No. They've served their sentence. They got their passage paid by the
Salvation Army. They knew Robert." She hesitated a moment. "If you want
to, you can come with me. They've got no money. They'd be grateful if
you gave them a little."

"All right. Yes, I'd like to come."

"They seem very decent fellows. One of them doesn't look more than
thirty now. Marcel told me he was a cook and he was sent out for killing
another man in the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked. I don't
know what the other had done. You'd better go and have your bath." She
went over to the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass.
"Funny, I wonder why my eyelids are swollen. To look at me you'd think
I'd been crying, and you know I haven't, don't you?"

"Perhaps it was that smoky atmosphere last night. By George! you could
have cut it with a knife."

"I'll ring down for some ice. They'll be all right after we've been out
in the air for five minutes."

The Palette was empty when they got there. Late breakfasters had had
their coffee and gone, and it was too early for anyone to have come in
for an apritif before luncheon. They sat in a corner, near the window,
so that they could look out into the street. They waited for several
minutes.

"There they are," said Lydia.

Charley looked out and saw two men walking past. They glanced in,
hesitated a moment and strolled on, then came back; Lydia gave them a
smile, but they took no notice of her; they stood still, looking up and
down the street, and then doubtfully at the caf. It looked as though
they couldn't make up their minds to enter. Their manner was timid and
furtive. They said a few words to one another and the younger of the two
gave a hasty anxious glance behind him. The other seemed on a sudden to
force himself to a decision and walked towards the door. His friend
followed quickly. Lydia gave them a wave and a smile when they came in.
They still took no notice. They looked round stealthily, as though to
assure themselves that they were safe, and then, the first with averted
eyes, the other fixing the ground, came up. Lydia shook hands with them
and introduced Charley. They evidently had expected her to be alone and
his presence disconcerted them. They gave him a look of suspicion. Lydia
explained that he was an Englishman, a friend who was spending a few
days in Paris. Charley, a smile on his lips which he sought to make
cordial, stretched out his hand; they took it, one after the other, and
gave it a limp pressure. They seemed to have nothing to say. Lydia bade
them sit down and asked them what they would have.

"A cup of coffee."

"You'll have something to eat?"

The elder one gave the other a faint smile.

"A cake, if there is one. The boy has a sweet tooth, and over there,
from where we come, there wasn't much in that line."

The man who spoke was a little under the middle height. He might have
been forty. The other was two or three inches taller and perhaps ten
years younger. Both were very thin. They both wore collars and ties and
thick suits, one of a grey-and-white check and the other dark green, but
the suits were ill-cut and sat loosely on them. They did not look at
ease in them. The elder one, sturdy though short, had a well-knit
figure; his sallow, colourless face was much lined. He had an air of
determination. The other's face was as sallow and colourless, but his
skin, drawn tightly over the bones, was smooth and unlined; he looked
very ill. There was another trait they shared: the eyes of both seemed
preternaturally large, and when they turned them on you they did not
appear to look at you, but beyond, with a demented stare, as though they
were gazing at something that filled them with horror. It was very
painful. At first they were shy, and since Charley was shy too, though
he tried to show his friendliness by offering them cigarettes, while
Lydia, seeming to find no need for words, contented herself with looking
at them, they sat in silence. But she looked at them with such tender
concern that the silence was not embarrassing. The waiter brought them
coffee and a dish of cakes. The elder man toyed with one of them, but
the other ate greedily, and as he ate he gave his friend now and then
little touching looks of surprised delight.

"The first thing we did when we got out by ourselves in Paris was to go
to a confectioner's, and the boy ate six chocolate clairs one after the
other. But he paid for it."

"Yes," said the other seriously. "When we got out into the street I was
sick. You see, my stomach wasn't used to it. But it was worth it."

"Did you eat very badly over there?"

The elder man shrugged his shoulders.

"Beef three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. One doesn't notice
it after a time. And then, if you behave yourself you get cheese and a
little wine. And it's better to behave yourself. Of course it's worse
when you've done your sentence and you're freed. When you're in prison
you get board and lodging, but when you're free you have to shift for
yourself."

"My friend doesn't know," said Lydia. "Explain to him. They don't have
the same system in England."

"It's like this. You're sentenced to a term of imprisonment, eight, ten,
fifteen, twenty years, and when you've done it you're a _libr_. You
have to stay in the colony the same number of years that you were
sentenced to. It's hard to get work. The _librs_ have a bad name and
people won't employ them. It's true that you can get a plot of land and
cultivate it, but it's not everyone who can do that. After being in
prison for years, taking orders from the warders and half the time doing
nothing, you've lost your initiative; and then there's malaria and
hook-worm; you've lost your energy. Most of them get work only when a
ship comes in to harbour and they can earn a little by unloading the
cargo. There's nothing much for the _libr_ but to sleep in the market,
drink rafia when he gets the chance, and starve. I was lucky. You see,
I'm an electrician by trade, and a good one; I know my job as well as
anyone, so they needed me. I didn't do so badly."

"How long was your sentence?" asked Lydia.

"Only eight years."

"And what did you do?"

He slightly shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a deprecating smile.

"Folly of youth. One's young, one gets into bad company, one drinks too
much; and then one day something happens and one has to pay for it all
one's life. I was twenty-four when I went out and I'm forty now. I've
spent my best years in that hell."

"He could have got away before," said the other, "but he wouldn't."

"You mean you could have escaped?" said Lydia.

Charley gave her a quick, searching glance but her face told him
nothing.

"Escape? No, that's a mug's game. One can always escape, but there are
few who get away. Where can you go? Into the bush? Fever, wild animals,
starvation, and the natives who'll take you for the sake of the reward.
A good many try it. You see, they get so fed up with the monotony, the
food, the orders, the sight of all the rest of the prisoners, they think
anything's better, but they can't stick it out; if they don't die of
illness or starvation, they're captured or give themselves up; and then
it's two years' solitary confinement, or more, and you have to be a
hefty chap if that doesn't break you. It was easier in the old days when
the Dutch were building their railway, you could get across the river
and they'd put you to work on it, but now they've finished the railway
and they don't want labour any more. They catch you and send you back.
But even that had its risks. There was a Customs official who used to
promise to take you over the river for a certain sum--he had a regular
tariff; you'd arrange to meet him at a place in the jungle at night, and
when you kept the appointment he just shot you dead and emptied your
pockets. They say he did away with more than thirty fellows before he
was caught. Some of them get away by sea. Half a dozen club together and
get a _libr_ to buy a rickety boat for them. It's a hard journey,
without a compass or anything, and one never knows when a storm will
spring up; it's more by luck than good management if they get anywhere.
And where can they go? They won't have them in Venezuela any longer and
if they land there they're just put in prison and sent back. If they
land in Trinidad the authorities keep them for a week, stock them up
with provisions, even give them a boat if theirs isn't seaworthy, and
then send them off, out into the sea with no place to go to. No, it's
silly to try to escape."

"But men do," said Lydia. "There was that doctor, what was his name?
They say he's practising somewhere in South America and doing well."

"Yes, if you've got money you can get away sometimes, not if you're on
the islands, but if you're at Cayenne or St. Laurent. You can get the
skipper of a Brazilian schooner to pick you up at sea, and if he's
honest he'll land you somewhere down the coast and you're pretty safe.
If he isn't, he takes your money and chucks you overboard. But he'll
want twelve thousand francs now, and that means double because the
_libr_ who gets the money in for you takes half as his commission. And
then you can't land in Brazil without a penny in your pocket. You've got
to have at least thirty thousand francs, and who's got that?"

Lydia asked a question and once more Charley gave her an enquiring look.

"But how can you be sure that the _libr_ will hand over the money
that's sent him?" she said.

"You can't. Sometimes he doesn't, but then he ends with a knife in his
back, and he knows very well the authorities aren't going to bother very
much if a damned _libr_ is found dead one morning."

"Your friend said just now you could have got away sooner, but didn't.
What did he mean by that?"

The little man gave his shoulders a deprecating shrug.

"I made myself useful. The commandant was a decent chap and he knew I
was a good worker and honest. They soon found out they could leave me in
a house by myself when they wanted a job done and I wouldn't touch a
thing. He got me permission to go back to France when I still had two
more years to go of my time as a _libr_." He gave his friend a
touching smile. "But I didn't like to leave that young scamp. I knew
that without me to look after him he'd get into trouble."

"It's true," said the other. "I owe everything to him."

"He was only a kid when he came out. He had the next bed to mine. He put
up a pretty good show in the daytime, but at night he'd cry for his
mother. I felt sorry for him. I don't know how it happened, I got an
affection for him; he was lost among all those men, poor little chap,
and I had to look after him. Some of them were inclined to be nasty to
him, one Algerian was always bothering, but I settled his hash and after
that they left the boy in peace."

"How did you do that?"

The little man gave a grin so cheerful and roguish that it made him look
on a sudden ten years younger.

"Well, you know, in that life a man can only make himself respected if
he knows how to use his knife. I ripped him up the belly."

Charley gave a gasp. The man made the statement so naturally that one
could hardly believe one had heard right.

"You see, one's shut up in the dormitory from nine till five and the
warders don't come in. To tell you the truth, it would be as much as
their lives were worth. If in the morning a man's found with a hole in
his gizzard, the authorities ask no questions so as they won't be told
no lies. So you see, I felt a kind of responsibility for the boy. I had
to teach him everything. I've got a good brain and I soon discovered
that out there if you want to make it easy for yourself the only thing
is to do what you're told and give no trouble. It's not justice that
reigns on the earth, it's force, and they've got the force, the
authorities; one of these days perhaps we shall have it, we the working
men, and then we shall get a bit of our own back on the bourgeois, but
till then we've got to obey. That's what I taught him, and I taught him
my job too, and now he's almost as good an electrician as I am."

"The only thing now is to find work," said the other. "Work together."

"We've gone through so much together we can't be parted now. You see,
he's all I've got. I've got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my
mother's dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble.
Women are bitches. It's hard for a chap to live without any affection in
his life."

"And I, who have I got? It's for life, us two."

There was something very affecting in the friendship that bound those
two hapless men together. It gave Charley a sense of exaltation that
somewhat embarrassed him; he would have liked to tell them that he
thought it brave and beautiful, but he knew he could never bring himself
to say anything so unusual. But Lydia had none of his shyness.

"I don't think there are many men who would have stayed in that hell for
two long years when they could get away, for the sake of a friend."

The man chuckled.

"You see, over there time is just the opposite of money; there a little
money is a great deal and a lot of time is nothing very much. While six
sous is a sum that you hoard as if it was a fortune, two years is a
period that's hardly worth talking about."

Lydia sighed deeply. It was plain of what she was thinking.

"Berger isn't there for so long, is he?"

"Fifteen years."

There was a silence. One could see that Lydia was making a great effort
to control her emotion, but when she spoke there was a break in her
voice.

"Did you see him?"

"Yes. I talked to him. We were in hospital together. I went in to have
my appendix out, I didn't want to get back to France and have trouble
with it here. He'd been working on the road they're making from St.
Laurent to Cayenne and he got a bad go of malaria."

"I didn't know. I've had one letter from him, but he said nothing about
it."

"Out there everyone has malaria sooner or later. It's not worth making a
song and dance about. He's lucky to have got it so soon. The chief
medical officer took a fancy to him, he's an educated man, Berger, and
there aren't many of them. They were going to apply to get him
transferred to the hospital service when he recovered. He'll be all
right there."

"Marcel told me last night that he'd given you a message for me."

"Yes, he gave me an address." He took a bundle of papers out of his
pocket and gave Lydia a scrap on which something was written. "If you
can send any money, send it there. But remember that he'll only get half
what you send."

Lydia took the bit of paper, looked at it, and put it in her bag.

"Anything else?"

"Yes. He said you weren't to worry. He said it wasn't so bad as it might
be, and he was finding his feet and he'd make out all right. And that's
true, you know. He's no fool. He won't make many mistakes. He's a chap
who'll make the best of a bad job. You'll see, he'll be happy enough."

"How can he be happy?"

"It's funny what one can get used to. He's a bit of a wag, isn't he? He
used to make us laugh at some of the things he said. He's a rare one for
seeing the funny side of things, there's no mistake about that."

Lydia was very pale. She looked down in silence. The elder man turned to
his friend.

"What was that funny thing I told you he'd said about that cove in the
hospital who cut his blasted throat?"

"Oh, I remember. Now what was it? It's clean gone out of my mind, but I
know it made me laugh my head off."

A long silence fell. There seemed nothing more to say. Lydia was
pensive; and the two men sat limp on their chairs, their eyes vacant,
like the mechanical dolls they sell on the Boulevard Montparnasse which
gyrate, rocking, round and round and then on a sudden stop dead. Lydia
sighed.

"I think that's about all," she said. "Thank you for coming. I hope
you'll get the job you're looking for."

"The Salvation Army are doing what they can for us. I expect something
will turn up."

Charley fished his note-case out of his pocket.

"I don't suppose you're very flush. I'd like to give you something to
help you along till you find work."

"It would be useful," the man smiled pleasantly. "The Army doesn't do
much but give one board and lodging."

Charley handed them five hundred francs.

"Give it to the kid to take care of. He's got the saving disposition of
the peasant he is, he sweats blood when he has to spend money, and he
can make five francs go farther than any old woman in the world."

They went out of the caf, the four of them, and shook hands. During the
hour they had spent together the two men had lost their shyness, but
when they got out into the street it seized them again. They seemed to
shrink as though they desired to make themselves as inconspicuous as
possible, and looked furtively to right and left as if afraid that
someone would pounce upon them. They walked off side by side, with bent
heads, and after another quick glance backward slunk round the nearest
corner.

"I suppose it's only prejudice on my part," said Charley, "but I'm bound
to say that I didn't feel very much at my ease in that company."

Lydia made no reply. They walked along the boulevard in silence; they
lunched in silence. Lydia was immersed in thought the nature of which he
could guess and he felt that any attempt on his part at small talk would
be unwelcome. Besides, he had thoughts of his own to occupy him. The
conversation they had had with the two convicts, the questions Lydia
asked, had revived the suspicion which Simon had sown in his mind and
which, though he had tried to put it aside, had since then lurked in his
consciousness like the musty smell of a long closed room which no
opening of windows can quite dispel. It worried him, not so much because
he minded being made a fool of, as because he did not want to think that
Lydia was a liar and a hypocrite.

"I'm going along to see Simon," he said when they had finished luncheon.
"I came over largely to see him and I've hardly had a glimpse of him. I
ought at least to go and say good-bye."

"Yes, I suppose you ought."

He also wanted to return to Simon the newspaper cuttings and the article
which he had lent him. He had them in his pocket.

"If you want to spend the afternoon with your Russian friends, I'll
drive you there first if you like."

"No, I'll go back to the hotel."

"I don't suppose I shall be back till late. You know what Simon is when
he gets talking. Won't you be bored by yourself?"

"I'm not used to so much consideration," she smiled. "No, I shan't be
bored. It's not often I have the chance to be alone. To sit in a room by
oneself and to know that no one can come in--why, I can't imagine a
greater luxury."

They parted and Charley walked to Simon's. He knew that at that hour he
stood a good chance of finding him in. Simon opened the door on his
ring. He was in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.

"Hulloa! I thought you might breeze along. I didn't have to go out this
morning, so I didn't dress!"

He hadn't shaved and he looked as though he hadn't washed either. His
long straight hair was in disorder. By the bleak light that came through
the north window his restless, angry eyes looked coal-black in his white
thin face and there were dark shadows beneath them.

"Sit down," he continued. "I've got a good fire to-day and the studio's
warm."

It was, but it was as forlorn, cheerless and unswept as before.

"Is the love affair still going strong?"

"I've just left Lydia."

"You're going back to London to-morrow, aren't you? Don't let her sting
you too much. There's no reason why you should help to get her rotten
husband out of jug."

Charley took the cuttings from his pocket.

"By your article I judged that you had a certain amount of sympathy for
him."

"Sympathy, no. I found him interesting just because he was such an
unmitigated, cold-blooded, unscrupulous cad. I admired his nerve. In
other circumstances he might have been a useful instrument. In a
revolution a man like that who'll stick at nothing, who has courage and
no scruples, may be invaluable."

"I shouldn't have thought a very reliable instrument."

"Wasn't it Danton who said that in a revolution it's the scum of
society, the rogues and criminals, who rise to the surface? It's
natural. They're needed for certain work and when they've served their
purpose they can be disposed of."

"You seem to have it all cut and dried, old boy," said Charley, with a
cheerful grin.

Simon impatiently shrugged his bony shoulders.

"I've studied the French Revolution and the Commune. The Russians did
too and they learnt a lot from them, but we've got the advantage now
that we can profit by the lessons we've learnt from subsequent events.
They made a bad mess of things in Hungary, but they made a pretty good
job of it in Russia and they didn't do so badly either in Italy or in
Germany. If we've got any sense we ought to be able to emulate their
success but avoid their mistakes. Bela Kun's revolution failed because
people were hungry. The rise of the proletariat has made it
comparatively simple to make a revolution, but the proletariat must be
fed. Organisation is needed to see that means of transport are adequate
and food supplies abundant. That, incidentally, is why power, which the
proletariat thought to seize by making the revolution, must always elude
their grasp and fall into the hands of a small body of intelligent
leaders. The people are incapable of governing themselves. The
proletariat are slaves and slaves need masters."

"You would hardly describe yourself any longer as a good democrat, I
take it," said Charley with a twinkle in his blue eyes.

Simon impatiently dismissed the ironical remark.

"Democracy is moonshine. It's an unrealisable ideal which the
propagandist dangles before the masses as you dangle a carrot before a
donkey. Those great watchwords of the nineteenth century, liberty,
equality, fraternity, are pure hokum. Liberty? The mass of men don't
need liberty and don't know what to do with it when they've got it.
Their duty and their pleasure is to serve; thus they attain the security
which is their deepest want. It's been decided long ago that the only
liberty worth anything is the liberty to do right, and right is decided
by might. Right is an idea occasioned by public opinion and prescribed
by law, but public opinion is created by those who have the power to
enforce their point of view, and the only sanction of law is the might
behind it. Fraternity? What do you mean by fraternity?"

Charley considered the question for a moment.

"Well, I don't know. I suppose it's a feeling that we're all members of
one great family and we're here on earth for so short a time, it's
better to make the best of one another."

"Anything else?"

"Well, only that life is a difficult job, and it probably makes it
easier for everybody if we're kind and decent to one another. Men have
plenty of faults, but there's a lot of good in them. The more you know
people the nicer you find they are. That rather suggests that if you
give them a chance they'll meet you half-way."

"Tosh, my dear boy, tosh. You're a sentimental fool. In the first place
it's not true that people improve as you know them better: they don't.
That's why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An
acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he's considerate and
polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but
grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him
so well that he doesn't trouble any longer to pretend: then you'll
discover a being of such meanness, of such a trivial nature, of such
weakness, of such corruption, that you'd be aghast if you didn't realise
that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to
condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes. For
the essence of man is egoism. Egoism is at once his strength and his
weakness. Oh, I've got to know men pretty well during the two years I've
spent in the newspaper world. Vain, petty, unscrupulous, avaricious,
double-faced and abject, they'll betray one another, not even for their
own advantage, but from sheer malice. There's no trick they won't
descend to in order to queer a rival's pitch; there's no humiliation
they won't accept to obtain a title or an order; and not only
politicians--lawyers, doctors, merchants, artists, men of letters. And
their craving for publicity; they'll cringe and flatter a
twopenny-halfpenny journalist to get a good press. Rich men will
hesitate at no shabby dodge to make a few pounds that they have no use
for. Honesty, political honesty, commercial honesty--the only thing that
counts with them is what they can get away with; the only thing that
restrains them is fear. For they're craven. And the protestations they
make, the high-flown humbug that falls from their lips, the shameless
lies they tell themselves. Oh, believe me, you can't do the work I've
been doing since I left Cambridge and preserve many illusions about
human nature. Men are vile. Cowards and hypocrites. I loathe them."

Charley looked down. He was a little shy about saying what he wanted to.
It sounded rather silly.

"Haven't you any pity for them?"

"Pity? Pity is womanish. Pity is what the beggar entreats of you because
he hasn't the guts, the industry and the brains to make a decent living.
Pity is the flattery the failure craves so that he may preserve his
self-esteem. Pity is the cheap blackmail that the prosperous pay to the
down-and-out so that they may enjoy their own prosperity with a better
conscience."

Simon drew his dressing-gown angrily round his thin body. Charley
recognised it as an old one of his which he had been going to throw away
when Simon asked if he could have it; he had laughed and said he would
give him a new one, but Simon, saying it was quite good enough for him,
had insisted on having it. Charley wondered uncomfortably if he resented
the trifling gift. Simon went on:

"Equality? Equality is the greatest nonsense that's ever muddled the
intelligence of the human race. As if men were equal or could be equal!
They talk of equality of opportunity. Why should men have that when they
can't take advantage of it? Men are born unequal; different in
character, in vitality, in brain; and no equality of opportunity can
offset that. The vast majority are densely stupid. Credulous, shallow,
feckless, why should they be given equality of opportunity with those
who have character, intelligence, industry and force? And it's that
natural inequality of man that knocks the bottom out of democracy. What
a stupid farce it is to govern a country by the counting of millions of
empty heads! In the first place, they don't know what's good for them,
and in the second, they haven't the capacity to get the good they want.
What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans
invented by wily, self-seeking politicians. A democracy is ruled by
words, and the orator seldom has brains, and if he has he hasn't time to
use them, since all his energy has to be given to cajoling the fools on
whose votes he depends. Democracy has had a hundred years' trial:
theoretically it was always absurd, and now we know that practically
it's a wash-out."

"Notwithstanding which, you propose, if you can, to get into Parliament.
You're a very dishonest fellow, my poor Simon."

"In an old-fashioned country like England, which cherishes its
established institutions, it would be impossible to gain sufficient
power to carry out one's plans except from within those institutions. I
don't suppose anyone could gain support in the country and gather round
himself an adequate band of followers to effect a _coup d'tat_ unless
he were a prominent member of one of the great parties in the House of
Commons. And since an upheaval can only be effected by means of the
people, it would have to be the Labour Party. Even when the conditions
are ripe for revolution the possessing classes still retain enough of
their privileges to make it worth their while to make the best of a bad
job."

"What conditions have you in mind? Defeat in war and economic distress?"

"Exactly. Even then the possessing classes only suffer relatively. They
put down their cars or close their country houses, thus adding to
unemployment, but not greatly inconveniencing themselves. But the people
starve. Then they will listen to you when you tell them they have
nothing to lose but their chains, and when you dangle before them the
bait of other people's property, the greed, the envy, which they've had
to repress because they had no means of gratifying them are let loose.
With liberty and equality as your watchwords you can lead them to the
attack. The history of the last five-and-twenty years shows that they're
bound to win. The possessing classes are enervated by their possessions,
they're humanitarian and sentimental, they have neither the will nor the
courage to defend themselves; their counsels are divided, and when their
only chance is in immediate and ruthless action they waste their time in
recrimination. But the mob, which is the instrument of the revolutionary
leaders, is a thing not of reason but of instinct, it is amenable to
hypnotic suggestion and you can rouse it to frenzy by catchwords; it is
an entity, and so is indifferent to the death in its ranks of such as
fall; it knows neither pity nor mercy. It rejoices in destruction
because in destruction it becomes conscious of its own power."

"I suppose you wouldn't deny that that entails the killing of thousands
of inoffensive people and the destruction of institutions that have
taken hundreds of years to build up."

"There's bound to be destruction in a revolution and there's bound to be
killing. Engels said years ago that the possessing classes must be
expected to resist suppression by every means in their power. It's a
fight to the death. Democracy has attached an absurd importance to human
life. Morally man is worthless and it's no loss to suppress him.
Biologically he's of no consequence; there's no more reason why it
should shock you to kill a man than to swat a fly."

"I begin to see why you were interested in Robert Berger."

"I was interested in him because he killed not for any sordid motive,
not for money, nor jealousy, but to prove himself and affirm his power."

"Of course it remains to be proved that communism is practicable."

"Communism? Who talked of communism? Everyone knows now that communism
is a wash-out. It was the dream of unpractical idealists who knew
nothing of the realities of life. Communism is the lure you offer to the
working classes to rouse them to revolt just as the cry of liberty and
equality is the slogan with which you fire them to dare. Throughout the
history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited.
There always will be. And it's right that it should be so because the
great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves; they are unfit to
control themselves, and for their own good need masters."

"That's rather a startling assertion."

"It's not mine, old boy," Simon answered ironically. "It's Plato's, but
the history of the world since he made it has amply demonstrated its
truth. What has been the result of the revolutions we've seen in our own
lifetime? The people haven't lost their masters, they've only changed
them, and nowhere has authority been wielded with a more iron hand than
under communism."

"Then the people are duped?"

"Of course. Why not? They're fools, and they deserve to be. What does it
matter? Their gain is substantial. They're not asked to think for
themselves any more; they're told what to do, and so long as they're
obedient they have the security they've always hankered after. The
dictators of our own day have made mistakes and we can learn by their
errors. They've forgotten Machiavelli's dictum that you can enslave the
people politically if you leave their private lives free. I should give
the people the illusion of liberty by allowing them as much personal
freedom as is compatible with the safety of the state. I would socialise
industry as widely as the idiosyncrasy of the human animal permits and
so give men the illusion of equality. And since they would all be
brothers under one yoke they would even have the illusion of fraternity.
Remember that a dictator can do all sorts of things for the benefit of
the people that democracy is prevented from doing because it has to
consider vested interests, jealousies and personal ambitions, and so he
has an unparalleled opportunity to alleviate the lot of the masses. I
went to a great communist meeting here the other day and on banner after
banner I read the words Peace, Work and Well-Being. Could any claims be
more natural? And yet there man is after a hundred years of democracy
still making them. A dictator can satisfy them by a stroke of the pen."

"But by your own admission the people only change their master; they're
still exploited; what makes you think that they'll put up with it?"

"Because they'll damned well have to. Under present conditions a
dictator with planes to drop bombs and armoured cars to fire
machine-guns can quell any revolt. The possessing classes could do the
same, and no revolution would succeed, but the event has shown that they
haven't the nerve; they kill a hundred men, a thousand even, but then
they get scared, they want to compromise, they offer to make
concessions, but it's too late then for concession or compromise and
they're swept away. But the people will accept their master because they
know that he is better and wiser than they are."

"Why should he be better and wiser?"

"Because he's stronger. Because he has the power, what he says is right
is right and what he says is good is good."

"It's as simple as A B C but even less convincing," said Charley with
some flippancy.

Simon gave him an angry scowl.

"You'd find it convincing enough if not only your bread and butter but
your life depended on it."

"And who, pray, is to choose the master?"

"Nobody. He's the ineluctable product of circumstances."

"That's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?"

"He rises to the top because he has the instinct to lead. He has the
will to power. He has audacity and enthusiasm, ability, industry and
energy. He fears nothing because to him danger is the salt of life."

"No one could say that you hadn't a good conceit of yourself, Simon,"
smiled Charley.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, I suppose you imagine yourself to possess the qualities you've
just enumerated."

"What makes you suppose it? I know myself as well as any man can know
himself. I know my capacities, but I also know my limitations. A
dictator must have a mystic appeal so that he excites his followers to a
religious frenzy. He must have a magnetism which makes it a privilege
for them to lay down their lives for him. In him they must feel that
they more greatly live. I have nothing in me of that. I repel rather
than attract. I could make people fear me, I could never make them love
me. You remember what Lincoln said: 'You can fool some of the people all
the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all
the people all the time.' But that's just what a dictator must do; he
must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way he can do
that, he must also fool himself. None of the dictators has a lucid,
logical brain; he has drive, force, magnetism, charm, but if you examine
his words closely you'll see that his intelligence is mediocre; he can
act because he acts on instinct, but when he begins to think he gets
muddled. I have too good a brain and too little charm to be a dictator.
Besides, it's better that the dictator brought to power by the
proletariat should be a member of it. The working classes will find it
more easy to identify themselves with him and thus will give him more
willingly their obedience and devotion. The technique of revolution has
been perfected. Given the right conditions it's easy for a resolute body
of men to seize power; the difficulty is to hold it. The Russian
revolution in the clearest possible way, the Italian and the German
revolutions in a lesser degree, have shown that there's only one means
by which it can be done. Terror. The working man who becomes head of a
state is exposed to temptations that only a very strong character can
resist. He must be almost superhuman if his head isn't turned by
adulation and if his resolution isn't enfeebled by unaccustomed luxury.
The working man is naturally sentimental; he's kind-hearted and so
accessible to pity; when he's got what he wants he sits back and lets
things slide; he forgives his enemies and is surprised when they stick a
knife in him as soon as his back is turned. He needs at his elbow
someone who, by his birth, education, training and character, is
indifferent to the trappings of greatness and immune to the debilitating
influence of success."

Simon for some time had been walking up and down the studio, but now he
came to an abrupt halt before his friend. With his white unshaven face
and dishevelled hair, in the dressing-gown huddled round his emaciated
limbs, he presented a grotesque appearance. But in a past that is not so
distant other young men as pale, as thin, as unkempt as he, in shabby
suits or in a student's blouse, had walked about their sordid rooms and
told of dreams seemingly as unrealisable; and yet time and opportunity
had strangely made their dreams come true, and, fighting their way to
power through blood, they held in their hands the life of millions.

"Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?"

Charley gave him a startled look. That was the name Lydia had mentioned.

"Yes, oddly enough I have."

"He was a gentleman. His family had been landowners in Poland since the
seventeenth century. He was a cultivated, well-read man. Lenin and the
Old Guard made the revolution, but without Dzerjinsky it would have been
crushed within a year. He saw that it could only be saved by terror. He
applied for the post that gave him control of the police and organised
the Cheka. He made it into an instrument of repression that acted with
the precision of a perfect machine. He let neither love nor hate
interfere with his duty. His industry was prodigious. He would work all
night examining the suspects himself, and they say he acquired so keen
an insight into the hearts of men that it was impossible for them to
conceal their secrets from him. He invented the system of hostages,
which was one of the most effective systems the revolution ever
discovered to preserve order. He signed hundreds, nay, thousands of
death warrants with his own hand. He lived with spartan simplicity. His
strength was that he wanted nothing for himself. His only aim was to
serve the revolution. And he made himself the most powerful man in
Russia. It was Lenin the people acclaimed and worshipped, but it was
Dzerjinsky who ruled them."

"And is that the part you wish to play if ever revolution comes to
England?"

"I should be well fitted for it."

Charley gave him his boyish, good-natured smile.

"It's just possible that I'd be doing the country a service if I
strangled you here and now. I could, you know."

"I dare say. But you'd be afraid of the consequences."

"I don't think I should be found out. No one saw me come in. Only Lydia
knows I was going to see you and she wouldn't give me away."

"I wasn't thinking of those consequences. I was thinking of your
conscience. You're not tough-fibred enough for that, Charley, old boy.
You're soft."

"I dare say you're right."

Charley did not speak for a while.

"You say Dzerjinsky wanted nothing for himself," he said then, "but you
want power."

"Only as a means."

"What to do?"

Simon stared at him fixedly and there was a light in his eyes that
seemed to Charley almost crazy.

"To fulfil myself. To satisfy my creative instinct. To exercise the
capacities that nature has endowed me with."

Charley found nothing to say. He looked at his watch and got up.

"I must go now."

"I don't want to see you again, Charley."

"Well, you won't. I'm off to-morrow."

"I mean, ever."

Charley was taken aback. He looked into Simon's eyes. They were dark and
grim.

"Oh? Why?"

"I'm through with you."

"For good?"

"For good and all."

"Don't you think that's rather a pity? I haven't been a bad friend to
you, Simon."

Simon was silent for a space no longer than it takes for an over-ripe
fruit to fall from the tree to the ground.

"You're the only friend I've ever had."

There was a break in his voice and his distress was so plain that
Charley, moved, with both hands outstretched, stepped forward
impulsively.

"Oh, Simon, why d'you make yourself so unhappy?"

A flame of rage leapt into Simon's tortured eyes and clenching his fist
he hit Charley as hard as he could on the chin. The blow was so
unexpected that he staggered and then, his feet slipping on the
uncarpeted floor, fell headlong; he was on his feet in a flash and,
furious with anger, sprang forward to give Simon the hiding he had
often, when driven beyond endurance, given him before. Simon stood quite
still, his hands behind his back, as though ready and willing to take
the chastisement that was coming to him without an effort to defend
himself, and on his face was an expression of so much suffering, of such
consternation, that Charley's wrath was melted. He stopped. His chin was
hurting him, but he gave a good-natured, chuckling laugh.

"You are an ass, Simon," he said. "You might have hurt me."

"For God's sake, get out. Go back to that bloody whore. I'm fed up to
the teeth with you. Go, go!"

"All right, old man, I'm going. But I want to give you a little presy
that I brought you for your birthday on the seventh."

He took out of his pocket one of those watches, covered in leather,
which you open by pulling out the two sides, and which are wound by
opening.

"There's a ring on it so you can hang it on your key chain."

He put it down on the table. Simon would not look at it. Charley, his
eyes twinkling with amusement, gave him a glance. He waited for him to
say something, but he did not speak. Charley went to the door, opened it
and walked out.

It was night, but the Boulevard Montparnasse was brightly lit. With the
New Year imminent there was a holiday feeling in the air. The street was
crowded and the cafs were chock-a-block. Everybody was taking it easy.
But Charley was depressed. He had a feeling of mortification, as one
might have if one had gone to a party expecting to enjoy oneself, and,
because one had been stupid and tactless, had come away conscious that
one had left behind a bad impression. It was a comfort to get back to
the sordid bedroom at the hotel. Lydia was sitting by the log fire
sewing, and the air was thick with the many cigarettes she had smoked.
The scene had a pleasant domesticity. It reminded one of an interior of
Vuillard's, with its intimate, cosy charm, but painted by Utrillo so
that it had at the same time a touching squalor. Lydia greeted him with
her quiet, friendly smile.

"How was your friend Simon?"

"Mad as a hatter."

Lighting his pipe, he sat down on the floor in front of the fire, with
his back against the seat of her chair. Her nearness gave him a sense of
comfort. He was glad that she did not speak. He was troubled by all the
horrible things Simon had said to him. He could not get out of his head
the picture of that thin creature, his pale face scrubby with a two
days' beard, underfed and overworked, walking up and down in his old
dressing-gown and with a cold-blooded, ruthless malignance delivering
himself of his fantastic ideas. But breaking in upon this, as it were,
was the recollection of the little boy with the big dark eyes who seemed
to yearn for affection and yet repelled it, the little boy with whom he
went to the circus during the Christmas holidays and who got so wildly
excited at the unaccustomed treat, with whom he bicycled or went for
long walks in the country, who was at times so gay and amusing, with
whom it was jolly to talk and laugh and rag and play the fool. It seemed
incredible that that little boy should have turned into that young man,
and so heart-rending that he could have wept.

"I wonder what'll happen to Simon in the end?" he muttered.

Hardly knowing that he had spoken aloud, he almost thought Lydia had
read his thoughts when she answered:

"I don't know the English. If he were Russian I'd say he'll either
become a dangerous agitator or he'll commit suicide."

Charley chuckled.

"Oh well, we English have a wonderful capacity for making our wild oats
into a nourishing diet. It's equally on the cards that he'll end up as
the editor of _The Times_."

He got up and seated himself in the arm-chair which was the only fairly
comfortable seat in the room. He looked reflectively at Lydia busily
plying her needle. There was something he wanted to say to her, but the
thought of it made him nervous, and yet he was leaving next day and this
might well be his last opportunity. The suspicion that Simon had sown in
his candid heart rankled. If she had been making a fool of him, he would
sooner know; then when they parted he could shrug his shoulders and with
a good conscience forget her. He decided to settle the matter there and
then, but being shy of making her right out the offer he had in mind, he
approached it in a round-about way.

"Have I ever told you about my Great-Aunt Martha?" he started lightly.

"No."

"She was my great-grandfather's eldest child. She was a grim-featured
spinster with more wrinkles on her sallow face than I've ever seen on a
human being. She was very small and thin, with tight lips, and she never
looked anything but acidly disapproving. She used to terrify me when I
was a kid. She had an enormous admiration for Queen Alexandra and to the
end of her days wore her hair, only it was a wig, as the Queen wore
hers. She always dressed in black, with very full long skirts and a
pinched-in waist, and the collar of her bodice came up to her ears. She
wore a heavy gold chain round her neck, with a large gold cross dangling
from it, and gold bangles on her wrists. She was appallingly genteel.
She continued to live in the grand house old Sibert Mason built for
himself when he began to get on in the world and she never changed a
thing. To go there was like stepping back into the eighteen-seventies.
She died only a few years ago at a great age and left me five hundred
pounds."

"That was nice."

"I should have rather liked to blue it, but my father persuaded me to
save it. He said I should be damned thankful to have a little nest-egg
like that when I came to marry and wanted to furnish a flat. But I don't
see any prospect of my marrying for years yet and I don't really want
the money. Would you like me to give you two hundred of it?"

Lydia, going on with her work, had listened amiably, though without more
than polite interest, to a story that could mean nothing very much to
her; but now, jabbing her needle in the material she was sewing, she
looked up.

"What on earth for?"

"I thought it might be useful to you."

"I don't understand. What have I done that you should wish to give me
two hundred pounds?"

Charley hesitated. She was gazing at him with those blue, large, but
rather flat eyes of hers, and there was in them an extreme attention as
though she were trying to see into the depths of his soul. He turned his
head away.

"You could do a good deal to help Robert."

A faint smile broke on her lips. She understood.

"Has your friend Simon been telling you that I was at the Srail to earn
enough money to enable Robert to escape?"

"Why should you think that?"

She gave a little scornful laugh.

"You're very nave, my poor friend. It's what they all suppose. Do you
think I would trouble to undeceive them and do you think they would
understand if I told them the truth? I don't want your money; I have no
use for it." Her voice grew tender. "It's sweet of you to offer it.
You're a dear creature, but such a kid. Do you know that what you're
suggesting is a crime which might easily land you in prison?"

"Oh, well."

"You don't believe what I told you the other day?"

"I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this
world. After all, I was nothing to you, there was no reason for you to
tell me the truth if you didn't want to. And those men this morning and
the address they gave you to send money to. You can't be surprised if I
put two and two together."

"I'm glad if I can send Robert money so that he can buy himself
cigarettes and a little food. But what I told you was true. I don't want
him to escape. He sinned and he must suffer."

"I can't bear the thought of your going back to that horrible place. I
know you a little now; it's awful to think of you of all people leading
that life."

"But I told you: I must atone; I must do for him what he hasn't the
strength to do for himself."

"But it's crazy. It's so morbid. It's senseless. I might understand,
though even then I'd think it outrageously wrong-headed, if you believed
in a cruel god who exacted vengeance and who was prepared to take your
suffering--well, in part-payment for the wrong Robert had done, but you
told me you don't believe in God."

"You can't argue with feeling. Of course it's unreasonable, but reason
has nothing to do with it. I don't believe in the god of the Christians
who gave his son in order to save mankind. That's a myth. But why should
it have arisen if it didn't express some deep-seated intuition in men? I
don't know what I believe, because it's instinctive, and how can you
describe an instinct with words? I have an instinct that the power that
rules us, human beings, animals and things, is a dark and cruel power
and that everything has to be paid for, a power that demands an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and that though we may writhe and squirm
we have to submit, for the power is ourselves."

Charley made a vague gesture of discouragement. He felt as if he were
trying to talk with someone whose language he could not understand.

"How long are you going on at the Srail?"

"I don't know. Until I have done my share. Until the time comes when I
feel in my bones that Robert is liberated not from his prison, but from
his sin. At one time I used to address envelopes. There are hundreds and
hundreds of them and you think you'll never get them all done, you
scribble and scribble interminably, and for a long time there seem to be
as many to do as there ever were, and then suddenly, when you least
expect it, you find you've done the last one. It's such a curious
sensation."

"And then, will you go out to join Robert?"

"If he wants me."

"Of course he'll want you," said Charley.

She gave him a look of infinite sadness.

"I don't know."

"How can you doubt it? He loves you. After all, think what your love
must mean to him."

"You heard what those men said to-day. He's gay, he's got a soft billet,
he's making the best of things. He was bound to. That's what he's like.
He loved me, yes, I know, but I know also that he's incapable of loving
for very long. I couldn't have held him indefinitely even if nothing had
happened. I knew that always. And when the time comes for me to go, what
hope have I that anything will be left of the love he once bore me?"

"But how, if you think that, can you still do what you're doing?"

"It's stupid, isn't it? He's cruel and selfish, unscrupulous and wicked.
I don't care. I don't respect him, I don't trust him, but I love him; I
love him with my body, with my thoughts, with my feelings, with
everything that's me." She changed her tone to one of light raillery.
"And now that I've told you that, you must see that I'm a very
disreputable woman who is quite unworthy of your interest and sympathy."

Charley considered for a moment.

"Well, I don't mind telling you that I'm rather out of my depth. But for
all the hell he's enduring I'm not sure if I wouldn't rather be in his
shoes than yours."

"Why?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, because I can't imagine anything more
heart-rending than to love with all your soul someone that you know is
worthless."

Lydia gave him a thoughtful, rather surprised look, but did not answer.




                               CHAPTER X


Charley's train left at midday. Somewhat to his surprise Lydia told him
that she would like to come and see him off. They breakfasted late and
packed their bags. Before going downstairs to pay his bill Charley
counted his money. He had plenty left.

"Will you do me a favour?" he asked.

"What is it?"

"Will you let me give you something to keep in case of emergency?"

"I don't want your money," she smiled. "If you like you can give me a
thousand francs for Evgenia. It'll be a godsend to her."

"All right."

They drove first to the Rue du Chteau d'Eau, where she lived, and there
she left her bag with the concierge. Then they drove to the Gare du
Nord. Lydia walked along the platform with him and he bought a number of
English papers. He found his seat in the Pullman. Lydia, coming in with
him, looked about her.

"D'you know, this is the first time I've ever been inside a first-class
carriage in my life," she said.

It gave Charley quite a turn. He had a sudden realisation of a life
completely devoid not only of the luxuries of the rich, but even of the
comforts of the well-to-do. It caused him a sharp pang of discomfort to
think of the sordid existence that had always been, and always would be,
hers.

"Oh well, in England I generally go third," he said apologetically, "but
my father says that on the Continent one ought to travel like a
gentleman."

"It makes a good impression on the natives."

Charley laughed and flushed.

"You have a peculiar gift for making me feel a fool."

They walked up and down the platform, trying as people do on such
occasions to think of something to say, but able to think of nothing
that seemed worth saying. Charley wondered if it passed through her mind
that in all probability they would never see one another again in all
their lives. It was odd to think that for five days they had been almost
inseparable and in an hour it would be as though they had never met. But
the train was about to start. He put out his hand to say good-bye to
her. She crossed her arms over her breast in a way she had which had
always seemed to him strangely moving--she had had her arms so crossed
when she wept in her sleep--and raised her face to his. To his amazement
he saw that she was crying. He put his arms round her and for the first
time kissed her on the mouth. She disengaged herself and, turning away
from him, quickly hurried down the platform. Charley got into his
compartment. He was singularly troubled. But a substantial luncheon,
with half a bottle of indifferent Chablis, did something to restore his
equanimity; and then he lit his pipe and began to read _The Times_. It
soothed him. There was something solid in the feel of the substantial
fabric on which it was printed that seemed to him grandly English. He
looked at the picture papers. He was of a resilient temper. By the time
they reached Calais he was in tearing spirits. Once on board he had a
small Scotch and pacing the deck watched with satisfaction the waves
that Britannia traditionally rules. It was grand to see the white cliffs
of Dover. He gave a sigh of relief when he stepped on the stubborn
English soil. He felt as though he had been away for ages. It was a
treat to hear the voices of the English porters, and he laughed at the
threatening uncouthness of the English Customs officials who treated you
as though you were a confirmed criminal. In another two hours he would
be home again. That's what his father always said:

"There's only one thing I like better than getting out of England, and
that's getting back to it."

Already the events of his stay in Paris seemed a trifle dim. It was like
a nightmare which left you shaken when with a start you awoke from it,
but as the day wore on faded in your recollection, so that after a while
you remembered nothing but that you had had a bad dream. He wondered if
anyone would come to meet him; it would be nice to see a friendly face
on the platform. When he got out of the Pullman at Victoria almost the
first person he saw was his mother. She threw her arms round his neck
and kissed him as though he had been gone for months.

"I told your father that as he'd seen you off I was going to meet you.
Patsy wanted to come too, but I wouldn't let her. I wanted to have you
all to myself for a few minutes."

Oh, how good it was to be enveloped in that safe affection!

"You are an old fool, Mummy. It's idiotic of you to risk catching your
death of cold on a draughty platform on a bitter night like this."

They walked, arm-in-arm and happy, to the car. They drove to Porchester
Close. Leslie Mason heard the front door open and came out into the
hall, and then Patsy tore down the stairs and flung herself into
Charley's arms.

"Come into my study and have a tiddly. The whisky's there. You must be
perished with the cold."

Charley fished out of his great-coat pocket the two bottles of scent he
had brought for his mother and Patsy. Lydia had chosen them.

"I smuggled 'em," he said triumphantly.

"Now those two women will stink like a brothel," said Leslie Mason,
beaming.

"I've brought you a tie from Charvet, Daddy."

"Is it loud?"

"Very."

"Good."

They were all so pleased with one another that they burst out laughing.
Leslie Mason poured out the whisky and insisted that his wife should
have some to prevent her from catching cold.

"Have you had any adventures, Charley?" asked Patsy.

"None."

"Liar."

"Well, you must tell us all about everything later," said Mrs. Mason.
"Now you'd better go and have a nice hot bath and dress for dinner."

"It's all ready for you," said Patsy. "I've put in half a bottle of bath
salts."

They treated him as though he had just come back from the North Pole
after a journey of incredible hardship. It warmed the cockles of his
heart.

"Is it good to be home again?" asked his mother, her eyes tender with
love.

"Grand."

But when Leslie, partly dressed, went into his wife's room to have a
chat with her while she did her face, she turned to him with a somewhat
anxious look.

"He's looking awfully pale, Leslie," she said.

"A bit washed out. I noticed that myself."

"His face is so drawn. It struck me the moment he got out of the
Pullman, but I couldn't see very well till we got here. And he's as
white as a ghost."

"He'll be all right in a day or two. I expect he's been racketing about
a bit. By the look of him I suspect he's helped quite a number of pretty
ladies to provide for their respectable old age."

Mrs. Mason was sitting at her dressing-table, in a Chinese jacket
trimmed with white fur, carefully doing her eyebrows, but now, the
pencil in her hand, she suddenly turned round.

"What _do_ you mean, Leslie? You don't mean to say you think he's been
having a lot of horrid foreign women."

"Come off it, Venetia. What d'you suppose he went to Paris for?"

"To see the pictures and Simon, and--well, go to the Franais. He's only
a boy."

"Don't be so silly, Venetia. He's twenty-three. You don't suppose he's a
virgin, do you?"

"I do think men are disgusting."

Her voice broke, and Leslie, seeing she was really upset, put his hand
kindly on her shoulder.

"Darling, you wouldn't like your only son to be a eunuch, would you
now?"

Mrs. Mason didn't quite know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

"I don't suppose I would really," she giggled.

It was with a sense of peculiar satisfaction that Charley, half an hour
later, in his second-best dinner-jacket, seated himself with his father
in a velvet coat, his mother in a tea-gown of mauve silk, and Patsy
maidenly in rose chiffon, at the Chippendale table. The Georgian silver,
the shaded candles, the lace doyleys which Mrs. Mason had bought in
Florence, the cut glass--it was all pretty, but, above all, it was
familiar. The pictures on the walls, each with its own strip-lighting,
were meritorious; and the two maids, in their neat brown uniforms, added
a nice touch. You had a feeling of security, and the world outside was
comfortably distant. The good, plain food was designed to satisfy a
healthy appetite without being fattening. In the hearth an electric fire
very satisfactorily imitated burning logs. Leslie Mason looked at the
menu.

"I see we've killed the fatted calf for the prodigal son," he said, with
an arch look at his wife.

"Did you have any good food in Paris, Charley?" asked Mrs. Mason.

"All right. I didn't go to any of the smart restaurants, you know. We
used to have our meals at little places in the Quarter."

"Oh. Who's we?"

Charley hesitated an instant and flushed.

"I dined with Simon, you know."

This was a fact. His answer neatly concealed the truth without actually
telling a lie. Mrs. Mason was aware that her husband was giving her a
meaning look, but she paid no attention to it; she continued to gaze on
her son with tenderly affectionate eyes, and he was much too ingenuous
to suspect that they were groping deep into his soul to discover
whatever secrets he might be hiding there.

"And did you see any pictures?" she asked kindly.

"I went to the Louvre. I was rather taken with the Chardins."

"Were you?" said Leslie Mason. "I can't say he's ever appealed to me
very much. I always thought him on the dull side." His eyes twinkled
with the jest that had occurred to him. "Between you and me and the
gatepost I prefer Charvet to Chardin. At least he is modern."

"Your father's impossible," Mrs. Mason smiled indulgently. "Chardin was
a very conscientious artist, one of the minor masters of the eighteenth
century, but of course he wasn't Great."

In point of fact, however, they were much more anxious to tell him about
their doings than to listen to his. The party at Cousin Wilfred's had
been a riot, and they had come back so exhausted that they'd all gone to
bed immediately after dinner on the night of their return. That showed
you how they'd enjoyed themselves.

"Patsy had a proposal of marriage," said Leslie Mason.

"Thrilling, wasn't it?" cried Patsy. "Unfortunately the poor boy was
only sixteen, so I told him that, bad woman as I was, I hadn't sunk so
low as to snatch a baby from his cradle, and I gave him a chaste kiss on
the brow and told him I would be a sister to him."

Patsy rattled on. Charley, smiling, listened to her, and Mrs. Mason took
the opportunity to look at him closely. He was really very good-looking
and his pallor suited him. It gave her an odd little feeling in her
heart to think how much those women in Paris must have liked him; she
supposed he'd gone to one of those horrible houses; what a success he
must have had, so young and fresh and charming, after the fat, bald
beastly old men they were used to! She wondered what sort of girl he had
been attracted by, she so hoped she was young and pretty, they said men
were attracted by the same type as their mother belonged to. She was
sure he'd be an enchanting lover; she couldn't help feeling proud of
him; after all, he was her son and she'd carried him in her womb. The
dear; and he looked so white and tired. Mrs. Mason had strange thoughts,
thoughts that she wouldn't have had anybody know for anything in the
world; she was sad, and a little envious, yes, envious of the girls he
had slept with, but at the same time proud, oh, so proud, because he was
strong and handsome and virile.

Leslie interrupted Patsy's nonsense and her own thoughts.

"Shall we tell him the great secret, Venetia?"

"Of course."

"But mind. Charley, keep it under your hat. Cousin Wilfred's worked it.
There's an ex-Indian governor that the party want to find a safe seat
for, so Wilfred's giving up his and in recognition he's to get a
peerage. What d'you think of that?"

"It's grand."

"Of course he pretends it means nothing to him, but he's as pleased as
Punch really. And, you know, it's nice for all of us. I mean, having a
peer in the family adds to one's prestige. Well, it gives one a sort of
position. And when you think how we started..."

"That'll do, Leslie," said Mrs. Mason, with a glance at the servants.
"We needn't go into that." And when they left the room immediately
afterwards, she added: "Your father's got a mania for telling everyone
about his origins. I really think the time has now arrived when we can
let bygones be bygones. It's not so bad when we're with people of our
own class, they think it's rather chic to have a grandfather who was a
gardener and a grandmother who was a cook, but there's no need to tell
the servants. It only makes them think you're no better than they are."

"I'm not ashamed of it. After all, the greatest families in England
started just as humbly as we did. And we've worked the oracle in less
than a century."

Mrs. Mason and Patsy got up from the table and Charley was left with his
father to drink a glass of port. Leslie Mason told him of the
discussions they had had about the title Cousin Wilfred should assume.
It wasn't so easy as you might think to find a name which didn't belong
to somebody else, which had some kind of connection with you, and which
sounded well.

"I suppose we'd better join the ladies," he said, when he had exhausted
the subject. "I expect your mother will want a rubber before we go to
bed."

But as they were at the door and about to go out, he put his hand on his
son's shoulder.

"You look a bit washed out, old boy. I expect you've been going the pace
a bit in Paris. Well, you're young and that's to be expected." He
suddenly felt a trifle embarrassed. "Anyhow, that's no business of mine,
and I think there are things a father and son needn't go into. But
accidents will happen in the best regulated families, and--well, what I
want to say is, if you find you've got anything the matter with you,
don't hesitate but go and see a doctor right away. Old Sinnery brought
you into the world and so you needn't be shy of him. He's discretion
itself and he'll put you right in no time; the bill will be paid and no
questions asked. That's all I wanted to tell you; now let's go and join
your poor mother."

Charley had blushed scarlet when he understood what his father was
talking about. He felt he ought to say something, but could think of
nothing to say.

When they came into the drawing-room Patsy was playing a waltz of
Chopin's and after she had finished his mother asked Charley to play
something.

"I suppose you haven't played since you left?"

"One afternoon I played a little on the hotel piano, but it was a very
poor one."

He sat down and played again that piece of Scriabin's that Lydia thought
he played so badly, and as he began he had a sudden recollection of that
stuffy, smoky cellar to which she had taken him, of those roughs he had
made such friends with, and of the Russian woman, gaunt and
gipsy-skinned, with her enormous eyes, who had sung those wild, barbaric
songs with such a tragic abandon. Through the notes he struck he seemed
to hear her raucous, harsh and yet deeply moving voice. Leslie Mason had
a sensitive ear.

"You play that thing differently from the way you used," he said when
Charley got up from the piano.

"I don't think so. Do I?"

"Yes, the feeling's quite different. You get a sort of tremor in it
that's rather effective."

"I like the old way better, Charley. You made it sound rather morbid,"
said Mrs. Mason.

They sat down to bridge.

"This is like old times," said Leslie. "We've missed our family bridge
since you've been away."

Leslie Mason had a theory that the way a man played bridge was an
indication of his character, and since he looked upon himself as a
dashing, open-handed, free-and-easy fellow, he consistently overcalled
his hand and recklessly doubled. He looked upon a finesse as un-English.
Mrs. Mason on the other hand played strictly according to the rules of
Culbertson and laboriously counted up the pips before she ventured on a
call. She never took a risk. Patsy was the only member of the family who
by some freak of nature had a card sense. She was a bold, clever player
and seemed to know by intuition how the cards were placed. She made no
secret of her disdain for the respective methods of play of her parents.
She was domineering at the card table. The game proceeded in just the
same way as on how many evenings it had done. Leslie, after overcalling,
was doubled by his daughter, redoubled, and with triumph went down
fourteen hundred; Mrs. Mason with her hand full of picture cards refused
to listen to her partner's insistent demand for a slam; Charley was
careless.

"Why didn't you return me a diamond, you fool?" cried Patsy.

"Why should I return you a diamond?"

"Didn't you see me play a nine and then a six?"

"No, I didn't."

"Gosh, that I should be condemned to play all my life with people who
don't know the ace of spades from a cow's tail."

"It only made the difference of a trick."

"A trick? A trick? A trick can make all the difference in the world."

None of them paid any attention to Patsy's indignation. They only
laughed and she, giving them up as a bad job, laughed with them. Leslie
carefully added up the scores and entered them in a book. They only
played for a penny a hundred, but they pretended to play for a pound,
because it looked better and was more thrilling. Sometimes Leslie would
have marked up against him in the book sums like fifteen hundred pounds
and would say with seeming seriousness that if things went on like that
he'd have to put down the car and go to his office by bus.

The clock struck twelve and they bade one another good-night. Charley
went to his warm and comfortable room and began to undress, but suddenly
he felt very tired and sank into an arm-chair. He thought he would have
one more pipe before he went to bed. The evening that had just gone by
was like innumerable others that he had passed, and none had ever seemed
to him more cosy and more intimate; it was all charmingly familiar, in
every particular it was exactly as he would have wished it to be;
nothing could be, as it were, more stable and substantial; and yet, he
could not for the life of him tell why, he had all the time been fretted
by an insinuating notion that it was nothing but make-believe. It was
like a pleasant parlour-game that grown-ups played to amuse children.
And that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened--at
this hour Lydia, her eyelids stained and her nipples painted, in her
blue Turkish trousers and her blue turban, would be dancing at the
Srail, or, naked, lying mortified, and cruelly exulting in her
mortification, in the arms of a man she abhorred; at this hour Simon,
his work at the office finished, would be walking about the emptying
streets of the Left Bank, turning over in his morbid and tortured mind
his monstrous schemes; at this hour Alexey and Evgenia, whom Charley had
never seen but whom through Lydia he seemed to know so well that he was
sure he would have recognised them if he met them in the street, Alexey,
drunk, would be inveighing with maudlin tears against the depravity of
his son, and Evgenia, sewing, sewing for dear life, would cry softly
because life was so bitter; at this hour the two released convicts, with
those staring eyes of theirs that seemed to be set in a gaze of horror
at what they had seen, would be sitting, each with his glass of beer, in
the smoky, dim cellar and there hidden amid the crowd feel themselves
for a moment safe from the ever-present fear that someone watched them;
and at this hour Robert Berger, over there, far away on the coast of
South America, in the pink-and-white stripes of the prison garb, with
the ugly straw hat on his shaven head, walking from the hospital on some
errand, would cast his eyes across the wide expanse of sea and, weighing
the chances of escape, think for a moment of Lydia with tolerant
affection--and that nightmare from which he thought he had happily
awakened had a fearful reality which rendered all else illusory. It was
absurd, it was irrational, but that, all that seemed to have a force, a
dark significance, which made the life he shared with those three, his
father, his mother, his sister, who were so near his heart, and the
larger, decent yet humdrum life of the environment in which some blind
chance had comfortably ensconced him, of no more moment than a shadow
play. Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had
truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his
father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had
contracted venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one
thing had happened to him--it was rather curious when you came to think
of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the
bottom had fallen out of his world.






[End of Christmas Holiday, by W. Somerset Maugham]
