The Age of Reason Page 21

  Then Marcelle continued, with a gesture of vexation: ‘It isn’t possible.’

  ‘Oh come! You were just going to be reasonable... Why isn’t it possible?’

  ‘You will be obliged to tell him that we see each other.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Daniel irritably. ‘I said so just now. But I know him, he won’t mind, he’ll be a bit put out, for the sake of appearances, and then, as he begins to feel guilty, he will be only too glad to have something against you. Besides, I shall say that we have only been seeing each other during the last few months, and at long intervals. Anyway, we should have had to tell him some time.’

  ‘True.’

  She did not look convinced. ‘It was our secret,’ she said with profound regret. ‘Look here, Daniel, it was my private life, I have no other.’ And she added venomously: ‘All I have of my own is what I hide from him.’

  ‘We must try. For the child’s sake.’

  She was on the point of giving way; he needed only to wait: she would slip, under her own momentum, into resignation and self-abandonment: in one moment, all she was and had would stand exposed, and she would say: ‘Do as you like, I am in your hands.’ She fascinated him: that soft fire that devoured him — was it Evil or Good? Good and Evil, their Good, his Evil — it was the same. Here was this woman, and this repellent and intoxicating communion of two selves.

  Marcelle passed a hand over her hair: ‘Well, let us try,’ she said defiantly. ‘After all, it will be a test.’

  ‘A test?’ asked Daniel. ‘A test for Mathieu do you mean?’

  ‘Yes —’

  ‘Can you suppose that he will remain indifferent? That he won’t be eager to have an explanation with you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And she added curtly: ‘I want to respect him.’

  Daniel’s heart began to throb violently: ‘Don’t you respect him any more?’

  ‘Certainly... But I’m no longer in confidence with him since yesterday evening. He has been... You are right: he has been too neglectful. He took no trouble about me. And then, what he said on the telephone today was pitiable. He...’

  She blushed: ‘He felt impelled to tell me that he loved me. Just as he was hanging up the receiver. It stank of a bad conscience. I can’t tell you the effect it had on me! If ever I ceased to respect him... But I won’t think of that. When I happen to be angry with him, I’m always so upset. If only he tries to make me talk a bit tomorrow, if he would ask me once, and only once: “What is in your mind?”’

  She was silent, and sat shaking her head despondently.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Daniel. ‘When I leave you, I’ll drop a note in his letter-box and make an appointment for tomorrow.’

  They were silent. Daniel began to think of tomorrow’s interview: it looked like being hard and heated, another plunge into the clinging slime of pity.

  ‘Daniel!’ said Marcelle. ‘Dear Daniel.’

  He raised his head, and met her eyes. The look in them was heavy and hypnotic, brimming with sexual gratitude, the look that follows love. He closed his eyes: there was between them something more than love. She stood open, he had entered into her, they were now one entity.

  ‘Daniel!’ Marcelle repeated.

  Daniel opened his eyes and coughed: he had a touch of asthma. He took her hand, and kissed her, letting his lips linger upon hers.

  ‘My archangel,’ said Marcelle over his head. He will spend his whole life bent over that odorous hand, and she will stroke his hair.

  CHAPTER 11

  A GREAT mauve flower was rising towards the sky; it was the night. And in that night Mathieu was walking through the city, thinking to himself: ‘I am a wash-out.’ It was quite a new idea, he must turn it over in his mind, and sniff at it with circumspection. From time to time Mathieu lost it, nothing remained but the words. The words were not devoid of a certain sombre charm. ‘A wash-out.’ Imagination could conceive all manner of grand disasters — suicide, revolt, and other violent issues. But the idea quickly returned: no, nothing of that kind: what was here in question was a little, quiet, modest misery, no matter for despair; on the contrary, a rather soothing state of mind. Mathieu had the impression that he had just been allowed any indulgence he fancied, like a sick man who cannot recover. ‘All I need do is to go on living,’ he thought. He read the word ‘Sumatra’ in letters of fire, and the Negro hurried towards him, touching his cap. On the threshold, Mathieu hesitated: he could hear confused sounds, a tango: his heart was still filled with lethargy and darkness. And then — it happened in an instant, just as a sleeper suddenly finds himself on his feet in the morning without knowing how he got there: he had pulled the green curtain aside, walked down seventeen steps, and emerged into a scarlet, echoing cellar, picked out with patches of unwholesome white — the table-cloths. At the far end of the cellar, silk-shirted gauchos were playing dance-music on a platform. Before him stood a throng of people, motionless, decorous, and apparently expectant: they were dancers: they looked like gloomy victims of an interminable destiny. Mathieu surveyed the room listlessly, in search of Boris and Ivich.

  ‘A table, sir?’ A sleek young man bowed to him with an insinuating air.

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ said Mathieu.

  The young man recognized him: ‘Oh, it’s you, sir,’ he said cordially. ‘Mademoiselle Lola is dressing. Your friends are at the far end, on the left — I’ll take you along.’

  ‘No, thanks, I shall find them all right You’re very full this evening.’

  ‘Yes, not so bad. Mostly Dutch. Rather noisy, but they drink a good deal.’

  The young man vanished. There was no prospect of threading a way between the dancing couples. Mathieu waited: he listened to the tango and the shuffling feet, watching the slow evolutions of that taciturn assemblage. Bare shoulders, a Negro’s head, some handsome women of uncertain age, and a number of elderly gentlemen dancing with an apologetic air. The rasping notes of the tango passed over their heads: the bandsmen did not appear to be playing for their benefit. ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ said Mathieu to himself. His jacket was shiny at the elbows, his trousers had lost their creases, he was a poor dancer, and he was incapable of amusing himself with the appropriate air of grave vacuity. He felt ill at ease: in Montmartre, despite the benevolence of the head-waiters, one could never feel at one’s ease: there was a sense of anxious, restless cruelty in the air.

  The white lights were switched on again. Mathieu advanced on to the dancing-floor among a throng of retreating backs. In an alcove stood two tables. At one of them, a man and a woman were talking intermittently, with eyes averted. At the other, he saw Boris and Ivich leaning towards each other, looking very intent, and quite charmingly austere. ‘Like two little monks.’ It was Ivich who was talking, and gesticulating vivaciously. Never, even in her confidential moments, had she presented such a face to Mathieu. ‘How young they are!’ thought Mathieu. He felt inclined to turn round and go away. But he went on towards them, because he could no longer endure his solitude: he felt as though he were looking at them through a keyhole. Soon they would catch sight of him, they would turn towards him those impassive faces which they kept for their parents and important persons, and even in their very hearts there would be something changed. He was now quite near Ivich, but she had not seen him. She was leaning close to Boris’s ear and whispering. She looked a little — just a very little — like an elder sister, and she was talking to Boris with an air of baffled tolerance. Mathieu felt a little cheered: even with her brother, Ivich did not quite let herself go, she played the part of elder sister, she never forgot herself. Boris laughed shortly: ‘Punk,’ was all he said.

  Mathieu laid a hand on their table. ‘Punk.’ On that word their dialogue closed for ever: it was like the last rejoinder in a novel or a play. Mathieu gazed at Boris and Ivich: they looked quite romantic, he thought.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Boris, getting up.

  Mathieu threw a
brief glance at Ivich: she was leaning back in her chair. Her eyes were pale and mournful. The real Ivich had disappeared. ‘And why the real one?’ he thought with irritation.

  ‘How are you, Mathieu?’ said Ivich.

  She did not smile, nor did she look astonished or annoyed: she seemed to find Mathieu’s presence quite natural. Boris jerked a hand towards the packed hall.

  ‘Quite a crowd,’ he said, with satisfaction.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘Would you like my place?’

  ‘No, don’t trouble: you’ll want it for Lola later on.’

  He sat down. The dance-floor was deserted, and there was no one on the band platform: the gauchos had finished their succession of tangos, the Negro jazz, ‘Hijito’s band’, would soon take their place.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ asked Mathieu.

  People were buzzing around him, Ivich had not received him unamiably: a moist warmth ran through him, and he savoured the agreeable intensification of existence that comes from the sense of being a man among other men.

  ‘A vodka,’ said Ivich.

  ‘Dear me! So you now like the stuff?’

  ‘It’s strong,’ she said, without committing herself.

  ‘But what’s that?’ asked Mathieu, anxious to deal fairly, pointing to a white froth in Boris’s glass.

  Boris eyed him with jovial and open-mouthed admiration; Mathieu felt embarrassed.

  ‘It’s filthy,’ said Boris, ‘it’s the barman’s cocktail.’

  ‘I suppose you ordered it for politeness’ sake?’

  ‘He’s been pestering me for the last three weeks to try it. The fact is, he doesn’t know how to make cocktails. He became a barman because he had been a conjurer. He says it’s the same sort of job, but he’s wrong.’

  ‘I suppose he’s thinking of the shaker,’ said Mathieu. ‘And besides, breaking eggs calls for a light hand.’

  ‘In that case he’d better have become a juggler. Anyway, I wouldn’t have touched his foul compound, but I borrowed a hundred from him this evening.’

  ‘A hundred francs,’ said Ivich, ‘but I had that amount.’

  ‘So had I,’ said Boris, ‘but it’s just because he’s the barman. It’s a done thing to borrow money from a barman,’ he explained, in a faintly austere tone.

  Mathieu looked at the barman. He was standing behind his bar, all in white, arms folded, and smoking a cigarette. He looked a placid sort of man.

  ‘I should like to have been a barman,’ said Mathieu: ‘It must be great fun.’

  ‘It would have cost you a lot,’ said Boris, ‘you would have broken so many glasses.’

  Silence fell. Boris looked at Mathieu, and Ivich looked at Boris.

  ‘I’m not wanted,’ said Mathieu sadly to himself.

  The head-waiter handed him the champagne list: he must be careful: he had under five hundred francs left.

  ‘I’ll have a whisky,’ said Mathieu.

  He was seized with a sudden disgust for economy, and the meagre wad of notes languishing in his pocket-book. He called the head-waiter back.

  ‘One moment. I’ll have some champagne.’

  He looked at the list again. Mumm cost 300 francs.

  ‘You’ll drink some,’ he said to Ivich.

  ‘No — yes,’ she said, after brief reflection, ‘I do like it better.’

  ‘Bring a bottle of Mumm, Cordon Rouge.’

  ‘I’m always glad to drink champagne,’ said Boris, ‘because I don’t like it. One must get used to it.’

  ‘Well, you are a pair, you two,’ said Mathieu. ‘You’re always drinking stuff you don’t like.’

  Boris beamed: he adored Mathieu to talk to him in that tone. Ivich bit her lips. ‘One can’t say anything to them,’ thought Mathieu, a little testily. ‘One of them always takes offence.’ There they were, confronting him, intent and grave: they had each of them conceived their individual picture of Mathieu, and they each insisted that he should conform to it. The trouble was that the two pictures conflicted.

  They sat in silence.

  Mathieu stretched his legs and smiled contentedly. The notes of a trumpet, shrill and defiant, reached his ears in gusts: it did not occur to him to listen for a tune: it was there, it made a noise, and gave him a rich, metallic thrill all over his skin. He realized, of course, that he was a wash-out: but, when all was said, in this dance-hall, at that table, among all those fellows who were also wash-outs, it did not seem to matter very much, and was not at all unpleasant. He looked round: the barman was still dreaming: on his right was a fellow wearing a monocle, alone, with a lined, drawn face: and another, farther off, also alone, and three drinks and a lady’s handbag on the table before him: his wife and his friend were no doubt dancing, and he looked in fact rather relieved: he yawned heavily behind his hand, and his little eyes blinked with satisfaction. Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes. Mathieu suddenly felt a kinship with all those creatures who would have done so much better to go home, but no longer had the power, and sat there smoking slender cigarettes, drinking steely-tasting compounds, smiling, as their ears oozed music, and dismally contemplating the wreckage of their destiny: he felt the discreet appeal of a humble and timorous happiness: ‘Fancy being one of that lot...’ Fear shook him, and he turned towards Ivich. Malicious and aloof as she was, in her lay his sole salvation. Ivich was peering rather dubiously at the transparent liquid remaining in her glass.

  ‘You must drink it at one go.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Mathieu: ‘you’ll scorch your throat.’

  ‘Vodka ought to be drunk straight off.’

  Ivich picked up her glass: ‘I would sooner drink it off, I shall have finished it quicker.’

  ‘No, don’t drink it, wait for the champagne.’

  ‘I must swallow the stuff,’ she said irritably. ‘I want to enjoy myself.’

  She threw herself back in her chair, raised the glass to her lips, and tipped its entire contents into her mouth, rather as though she were filling a jug. She remained thus for a second, not daring to swallow, with a little pool of fire at the bottom of her gullet. Mathieu felt distressed.

  ‘Swallow!’ Boris said to her. ‘Imagine that it’s water: that’s the only thing to do.’

  Ivich’s neck swelled, and she laid down the glass with a horrible grimace: her eyes were full of tears. The dark-haired lady at the next table, emerging for an instant from her morose abstraction, glanced at her indignantly.

  ‘Pah!’ said Ivich. ‘How it burns: it’s fire!’

  ‘I’ll buy you a bottle to practise on,’ said Boris.

  Ivich reflected for a moment. ‘It would be much better for me to train on marc, it’s stronger.’

  And she added with a rueful air, ‘I think I shall be able to enjoy myself now.’

  No one replied. She turned briskly towards Mathieu: it was the first time she had looked at him.

  ‘I suppose you can stand a lot of alcohol?’

  ‘He’s a terror,’ said Boris, ‘I’ve seen him drink seven whiskies one day when he was talking to me about Kant. In the end I stopped listening, I was tight enough for the two of us.’

  It was true: even in that way Mathieu could not sink his consciousness. All the time he was drinking, he took a stronger hold on — what? On what?: Suddenly he saw a vision of Gauguin, a broad, pallid face with desolate eyes. ‘On my human dignity,’ he thought. He was afraid that if he lost grip of himself for an instant he would suddenly find within his head, astray and drifting like a summer haze, the thought of a fly or a cockroach.

  ‘I have a horror of being tight,’ he explained apologetically. ‘I drink, but my whole body revolts against drunkenness.’

  ‘And yet you’re obstinate,’ said Boris with admiration. ‘As obstinate as an old mule.’

  ‘I’m not obstinate, I’m highly strung: I don’t know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me — it’s a form of self-protection.’ And he add
ed ironically, as though to himself: ‘I’m a thinking reed.’

  As though to himself. But it wasn’t true, he wasn’t being sincere: he really wanted to please Ivich. ‘So,’ he thought, ‘I’ve got to that point.’ He had begun to exploit his own downfall, he did not scorn to extract some small advantages from it, indeed he used it to flatter young women. ‘Rotter!’ He stopped in consternation: when he used that epithet to himself, he was not sincere either, he was not really indignant. It was a trick to retrieve himself, he thought, to save himself from humiliation by such ‘frankness’, but the frankness cost him nothing, indeed it entertained him. And the very judgement that he passed upon his own frankness, this dodge of climbing on to his own shoulders... ‘I must transform myself to the very bones.’ But nothing could help him to do that: all his thoughts were tainted from their origin. Suddenly, Mathieu began to open gently like a wound: he saw himself exposed and as he was: thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, thoughts about thoughts of thoughts, he was transparent and corrupt beyond any finite vision. Then the vision vanished, he found himself sitting opposite Ivich, who was eyeing him with a rather quizzical expression.

  ‘Well?’ he said to her. ‘So you’ve been doing some work lately.’

  Ivich shrugged her shoulders angrily. ‘I don’t want to talk about that. I’m sick of it, I’m here to enjoy myself.’

  ‘She spent the day curled up on her sofa, with eyes like saucers.’ And Boris added with pride, ignoring the black looks which his sister flung at him: ‘She’s a queer girl, she could die of cold in the middle of the summer.’

  Ivich had been shivering for many a long hour, and sobbing too perhaps. But she showed no sign of it at the moment: she had dabbed a little blue on her eyelids and raspberry-red on her lips, her cheeks were flushed with alcohol; she looked resplendent.

  ‘I want this to be a grand evening,’ she said, ‘as it’s my last.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ she said doggedly, ‘I shall be ploughed, I’m certain, and I shall go away immediately; I shan’t be able to stay a day longer in Paris. Or possibly...’