The Age of Reason Page 14

  ‘I’m not bringing your youth up against you,’ said he. ‘On the contrary: you had luck in avoiding certain misdemeanours. Nor, indeed, do I regret my own. The fact is we both had to work off the instincts we inherited from our old brigand of a grandfather. The difference is that I worked them off at one go, while you are dribbling them away, indeed you haven’t yet finished the process. I fancy that fundamentally you were much less of a brigand than I, and that is what is ruining you: your life is an incessant compromise, between an ultimately slight inclination towards revolt and anarchy, and your deeper impulses that direct you towards order, moral health, and I might almost say, routine. The result is that you are still, at your age, an irresponsible student. My dear old chap, look yourself in the face: you are thirty-four years old, you are getting slightly bald — not so bald as I am, I admit — your youth has gone, and the bohemian life doesn’t suit you at all. Besides, what is bohemianism, after all? It was amusing enough a hundred years ago, but today it is simply a name for a handful of eccentrics who are no danger to anybody, and have missed the train. You have attained the age of reason, Mathieu, you have attained the age of reason, or you ought to have done so,’ he repeated with an abstracted air.

  ‘Pah!’ said Mathieu, ‘Your age of reason is the age of resignation, and I’ve no use for it.’

  But Jacques was not listening. His face suddenly cleared and brightened, and he went on briskly: ‘Listen, as I said, I’m going to make you a proposal; if you refuse, you won’t find much difficulty in getting hold of four thousand francs, so I don’t feel any compunction. I am prepared to put ten thousand francs at your disposal if you marry the lady.’

  Mathieu had foreseen this move; in any event it provided him with a tolerable exit which would save his face.

  ‘Thank you, Jacques,’ he said, getting up. ‘You are really too kind, but it won’t do. I don’t say you are wrong all along the line, but if I have to marry one day, it must be because I want to. At this moment it would just be a clumsy effort to get myself out of a mess.’

  Jacques got up too. ‘Think it over,’ said he, ‘take your time. Your wife would be very welcome here, as I need not tell you; I have confidence in your choice. Odette will be delighted to welcome her as a friend. Besides, my wife knows nothing of your private life.’

  ‘I have already thought it over,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘As you please,’ said Jacques cordially — was he really much put out? And he added: ‘When shall we see you?’

  ‘I’ll come to lunch on Sunday,’ said Mathieu. ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Jacques, ‘and of course if you change your mind, my offer still holds.’

  Mathieu smiled and went out without replying. ‘It’s all over,’ he thought to himself, ‘it’s all over.’ He ran down the stairs, he was not exactly in a cheerful mood, but he felt he wanted to burst into song. At this moment, Jacques would be seated in his chair, staring into vacancy, and saying to himself, with a sad, grave smile: ‘I’m worried about that lad, though he has reached the age of reason.’ Or perhaps he had looked in on Odette; ‘I’m distressed about Mathieu. I can’t tell you why. But he isn’t reasonable.’ What would she say? Would she play the part of the mature and thoughtful wife, or would she extricate herself with some brief words of commendation without looking up from her book?

  Whereupon Mathieu remembered that he had forgotten to say good-bye to Odette. He felt rather remorseful: indeed he was in a remorseful mood. Was it true? Did he keep Marcelle in a humiliating position? He remembered Marcelle’s violent tirades against marriage. He had indeed proposed it to her. Once. Five years ago. Rather vaguely, in fact, and Marcelle had laughed in his face. ‘Alas,’ he thought, ‘my brother always inspires me with an inferiority complex.’ But no, it wasn’t really that; whatever his own sense of guilt, Mathieu had never failed to defend his position against Jacques. ‘But here is a damned fellow who makes me sick. When I cease to feel ashamed in his company, I’m ashamed for his sake. Well, well, one is never finished with one’s family, it’s like the smallpox that catches you as a child and leaves you marked for life.’ There was a cheap café at the corner of the Rue Montorgueil. He went in, and found the telephone box in a dark recess. He felt his heart flutter as he unhooked the receiver.

  ‘Hullo! Hullo! Marcelle?’

  Marcelle had a telephone in her own room.

  ‘Is that you?’ said she.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, the old woman is impossible.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Marcelle in a dubious tone.

  ‘Absolutely. She was three parts drunk, her place stinks, and you should see her hands! Besides, she’s an old brute.’

  ‘All right. And then —?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got someone in view. Through Sarah. Someone very good.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Marcelle with indifference. And she added: ‘How much?’

  ‘Four thousand.’

  ‘How much?’ repeated Marcelle, incredulously.

  ‘Four thousand.’

  ‘You see! It’s impossible, I shall have to go...’

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Mathieu forcibly. ‘I’ll borrow it.’

  ‘From whom? From Jacques?’

  ‘I’ve just left him. He refuses.’

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘He refuses too, the swine; I saw him this morning and I’m sure he was stuffed with money.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him it was for... that,’ said Marcelle sharply.

  ‘No,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He realized that his voice lacked assurance, and he added firmly: ‘Don’t get worked up. We have forty-eight hours. I’ll get the money. The devil’s in it if I can’t get four thousand francs somewhere.’

  ‘Well, get it,’ said Marcelle, in a queer tone, ‘get it.’

  ‘I’ll telephone to you. Shall I be seeing you tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘You... you aren’t too...’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marcelle hoarsely. ‘I’m in a misery.’ And she added in a gentler tone: ‘Well, do the best you can, my poor old boy.’

  ‘I’ll bring you the four thousand francs tomorrow evening,’ said Mathieu. He hesitated for a moment, and then said with an effort, ‘I do love you.’

  He emerged from the box, and as he walked through the café, he could still hear Marcelle’s dry voice: ‘I’m in a misery.’ She was angry with him. And yet he was doing the best he could... In a humiliating position. Am I keeping her in a humiliating position? And if... He stopped dead at the edge of the pavement. And if she wanted the child? That would burst up everything, he had but to think so for a second, and everything acquired a different meaning, that was quite another story, and Mathieu, Mathieu himself, was transformed from head to heels, he had been telling himself lies all along, and was playing a truly sordid role. Fortunately it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true, I have too often heard her laugh at her married friends when they were going to have children: sacred vessels, she used to call them, and say — ‘They’re bursting with pride because they’re going to lay an egg. ’ A woman who said that hadn’t the right to switch over to the sentimental view, that surely would be an abuse of confidence. And Marcelle is incapable of that, she would have told me, she would surely have told me, we told each other everything, and then... Oh Hell! He was sick of turning round and round in this inextricable tangle — Marcelle, Ivich, money, money, Ivich, Marcelle — I’ll do everything needful, but I don’t want to think about it any more, for God’s sake I must now think of something else. He thought of Brunet, but that was an even gloomier subject; a dead friendship: he felt nervous and depressed because he was going to see him again. He caught sight of a newspaper kiosk, and went up to it: ‘Paris-Midi, please.’

  There were none left, so he took a paper at random: it was the Excelsior.
Mathieu produced his ten sous and carried it off. Excelsior wasn’t an objectionable journal, it was printed on coarse paper, with a dull, velvety tapioca texture. It didn’t succeed in making you lose your temper, it merely disgusted you with life while reading it. ‘Aerial bombardment of Valencia,’ Mathieu read, and looked up with a vague sense of irritation: the Rue Réaumur, a street of blackened bronze. Two o’clock: the moment of the day when the heat was most menacing, it curled and crackled down the centre of the street like a long electric spark. ‘Forty aeroplanes circled over the centre of the city for an hour, and dropped a hundred and fifty bombs. The exact number of dead and wounded is not yet ascertained.’ He noticed out of the corner of his eye, beneath the headline, a horrid, huddled little paragraph in italics, which looked very chatty and convincing: ‘From our Special Correspondent,’ and gave the figures. Mathieu turned over the page, he did not want to know any more. A speech by M. Flandin at Ber-le-Duc. France crouching behind the Maginot Line...A statement by Stokowsky — I shall never marry Greta Garbo. More about the Weidmann affair. The King of England’s visit: Paris awaiting her Prince Charming. All Frenchmen...Mathieu shuddered and thought: ‘All Frenchmen are swine.’ Gomez had once said so in a letter from Madrid. He closed the paper and began to read the Special Correspondent’s despatch on the front page. Fifty dead and three hundred wounded had already been counted, but that was not the total, there were certainly corpses under the debris. No aeroplanes, no A.A. guns. Mathieu felt vaguely guilty. Fifty dead and three hundred wounded — what exactly did that signify? A full hospital? Something like a bad railway accident? Fifty dead. There were thousands of men in France who had not been able to read their paper that morning without feeling a clot of anger rise into their throat, thousands of men who had clenched their fists and muttered: ‘Swine!’ Mathieu clenched his fists and muttered: ‘Swine!’ and felt himself still all the more guilty. If at least he had been able to discover in himself a trifling emotion that was veritably if modestly alive, conscious of its limits. But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert — if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. ‘Swine.’ He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself. He had been to Valencia, he had seen the Fiesta in ’34, and a great corrida in which Ortega and El Estudiante had taken part. His thought circled above the town, seeking a church, a road, the facade of a house, of which he could say: ‘I saw that, they’ve destroyed it, it no longer stands.’ Ah! His thought swooped on to a darkened street, lying crushed under huge monuments. I have been there, I used to walk there in the morning, stifling in the scorching shade, while the sky blazed far above the people’s heads. That’s it. The bombs had fallen on that street, on the great grey monuments, the street had been enormously widened, it now extended into the interiors of the houses, there was no more shade in that street, the sky had dissolved and was pouring down upon the roadway, and the sun beat upon the debris. Something was on the threshold of existence, a timorous dawn of anger. At last! But it dwindled and collapsed, he was left in solitude, walking with the measured and decorous gait of a man in a funeral procession in Paris, not Valencia, Paris, haunted by a phantom wrath. The windows were ablaze, the cars sped down the street, he was walking among little men dressed in light suits, Frenchmen, who did not look up at the sky, and were not afraid of the sky. And yet it’s all real down yonder, somewhere beneath the same sun, it’s real, the cars have stopped, the windows have been smashed, poor dumb women sit huddled like dead chickens beside actual corpses, they lift their heads from time to time, and look up at the sky, the poisonous sky — all Frenchmen are swine. Mathieu was hot, and the heat was actual. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and he thought. ‘One can’t force one’s deeper feelings. Yonder was a terrible and tragic state of affairs that ought to arouse one’s deepest emotions...’ It’s no use, the moment will not come. I am in Paris, in my own particular environment. Jacques behind his desk saying, ‘No,’ Daniel laughing derisively, Marcelle in the pink room, and Ivich whom I kissed that morning. Her actual presence, repellent by the very force of its actuality. Everyone has his own world, mine is a hospital containing a pregnant Marcelle, and a Jew who asks a fee of four thousand francs. There are other worlds. Gomez. He had grasped his moment, and had gone: He had been lucky in the draw. And the fellow of the day before. He had not gone, he must be wandering about the streets, like me. But if he picks up a newspaper and reads: ‘Bombardment of Valencia,’ he will not need to put pressure on himself, he would suffer, there, in the ruined town. Why am I caught in this loathsome world of noises, surgical instruments, furtive taxi-rides, in this world where Spain does not exist, why aren’t I in the thick of it, with Gomez, and with Brunet? Why haven’t I wanted to go and fight? I could have chosen another world? Am I still free? I can go where I please. I meet with no resistance, but that’s worse: I am in an unbarred cage, I am cut off from Spain by...by nothing, and yet I cannot pass. He looked at the last page of Excelsior: photographs by the Special Correspondent. Bodies outstretched on the pavement under a wall. In the middle of the roadway lay a buxom old wife, on her back, her skirts rucked up over her thighs, and without a head. Mathieu folded up the paper and threw it into the gutter.

  Boris was waiting, outside the block of flats. When he saw Mathieu he assumed the chilly, rigid look that was intended to suggest that he was not quite all there.

  ‘I’ve just rung your bell,’ he said. ‘But I think you were out.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ asked Mathieu in the same tone.

  ‘Not absolutely,’ said Boris. ‘All I can say is that you didn’t open the door.’

  Mathieu looked at him dubiously. It was scarcely two o’clock, and in any event Brunet wouldn’t arrive for half an hour.

  ‘Come along,’ said he. ‘Let us have a little talk.’

  They walked upstairs; on the way Boris said in his natural voice: ‘Is it all right about the Sumatra this evening?’

  Mathieu turned away and pretended to be fumbling in his pocket for his keys. ‘I don’t know if I shall go,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking... perhaps Lola would rather have you quite to herself.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Boris: ‘but what does that matter? She’ll be polite. And we shan’t be alone in any case: Ivich will be there.’

  ‘You’ve seen Ivich?’ asked Mathieu, opening the door.

  ‘I’ve just left her,’ answered Boris.

  ‘After you,’ said Mathieu, standing aside.

  Boris went in before Mathieu, and walked with easy familiarity into the living-room. Mathieu eyed his angular back with some aversion. ‘He has seen her,’ he thought to himself.

  ‘You’ll come?’ said Boris.

  He had swung round and was looking at Mathieu with an expression of quizzical affection.

  ‘Ivich didn’t... didn’t say anything about this evening?’ asked Mathieu.

  ‘This evening?’

  ‘Yes: I was wondering if she meant to go: she looks quite taken up by her examination.’

  ‘She certainly means to go. She said it would be priceless for the four of us to make a party.’

  ‘All four of us?’ repeated Mathieu. ‘Did she say all four of us?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Boris ingenuously. ‘There’s Lola.’

  ‘Then she reckons on my going?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Boris, with astonishment.

  A silence fell. Boris was leaning over the balcony and looking at the street. Mathieu joined him and gave him a thump on the back.

  ‘I like your street,’ said Boris, ‘but you must get bored with it in the long run. I’m always surprised that you live in a flat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Free as you are, you ought to auction your furniture and live in a hotel. Don’t you realize what life would be like? You could spend one mo
nth in a Montmartre pothouse, the next in the Faubourg du Temple, and the next in the Rue Mouffetard...’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Mathieu peevishly, ‘it’s a matter of no importance.’

  ‘True,’ said Boris after an interval of meditation. ‘It’s of no importance. There’s a ring at the bell,’ he added with an air of annoyance.

  Mathieu went to the door: it was Brunet.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Mathieu. ‘You... you are before your time.’

  ‘Well yes,’ said Brunet, with a smile. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Brunet ‘Boris Serguine,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘Ah — the famous disciple,’ said Brunet. ‘I don’t know him.’

  Boris bowed coldly and withdrew to the far end of the room. Mathieu confronted Brunet, his arms hanging loose at his sides.

  ‘He hates being taken for my disciple.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Brunet impassively.

  He was rolling a cigarette between his fingers, a massive, indifferent figure, unperturbed by Boris’s venomous gaze.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Mathieu, ‘take an armchair.’

  Brunet sat on an ordinary chair. ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘Your armchairs are too insidious,’ and he added: ‘Well, you old social-traitor. I have to make my way into your lair to find you.’

  ‘That’s not my fault,’ said Mathieu, ‘I have often tried to see you, but you were not to be found.’

  ‘True,’ said Brunet. ‘I have become a sort of bagman. They keep me so much on the move that there are days when I can scarcely find myself.’ And he continued sympathetically: ‘It’s in your company that I find myself most easily, I have a feeling I must have left myself in store with you.’

  Mathieu flung him a grateful smile. ‘I have often thought that we ought to meet more often. I feel we should grow old less quickly if the three of us could forgather now and again.’