The Age of Reason Page 8

  ‘But you told me your father might sell the sawmill in a year or two from now, and the whole family come and settle in Paris.’

  ‘Oh my God! That’s what you’re all like,’ said Ivich, turning towards him, her eyes glittering with rage. ‘I should like to see you there. Two years in that hole, two years of black endurance. Can’T you get it into your head that those two years would be stolen from me? I’ve only got one life,’ she said passionately. ‘From the way you talk, you sound as though you believed yourself immortal. According to you, a year lost can be replaced.’ The tears came into her eyes. ‘That’s not true, it’s my youth that will be oozing out there, drop by drop. I want to live immediately, I haven’t begun, and I haven’t time to wait, I’m old already, I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘Ivich — please!’ said Mathieu. ‘You frighten me. Do try for once at least to tell me clearly how you got on in the practical test. Sometimes you look quite pleased, and sometimes you’re in despair.’

  ‘I messed it all up,’ said Ivich gloomily.

  ‘I thought you did all right in physics.’

  ‘I don’t think!’ said Ivich sardonically. ‘And then my chemistry was hopeless, I can’t keep the formulae in my head, they’re so dismal.’

  ‘But why did you go in for it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The P. C. B.?’

  ‘I had to get away from Laon,’ she said wildly.

  Mathieu made a helpless gesture: and they fell silent. A woman emerged from the cafe and walked slowly past them: she was handsome, with a very small nose in a sleek face, and she seemed to be looking for somebody. Ivich must first have smelt her scent. She raised her brooding face, saw the woman and her whole expression was transformed.

  ‘What a magnificent creature,’ she said in a low, deep voice. Mathieu hated that voice.

  The woman stood motionless, blinking in the sunshine, she might have been about thirty-five, her long legs could be seen in outline through her thin silk frock: but Mathieu had no desire to look at them, he was looking at Ivich. Ivich had become almost ugly, she was squeezing her hands hard against each other. She had said to Mathieu one day: ‘Little noses always make me want to bite them.’ Mathieu leaned forward until he could see her in three-quarter profile: she looked somnolent and cruel, just, he thought, as though she would like to bite.

  ‘Ivich,’ said Mathieu gently.

  She did not answer: Mathieu knew that she could not answer: he no longer existed for her, she was quite alone.

  ‘Ivich!’

  It was at such moments that he was most attracted by her, when her charming, almost dainty little person was possessed by a gripping force, an ardent, uneasy, graceless love of human beauty. ‘I,’ he thought, ‘am no beauty,’ and he felt alone in his turn.

  The woman departed. Ivich followed her with her eyes, and muttered passionately: ‘There are moments when I wish I were a man.’ She laughed a short dry laugh, and Mathieu eyed her regretfully.

  ‘Monsieur Delarue is wanted on the telephone,’ cried the commissionaire.

  ‘Here!’ said Mathieu.

  He got up: ‘Excuse me, it’s Sarah Gomez.’

  Ivich smiled coldly: he entered the cafe and went downstairs.

  ‘Monsieur Delarue? First box.’

  Mathieu picked up the receiver, the door would not shut.

  ‘Hullo, is that Sarah?’

  ‘Morning again,’ said Sarah’s nasal voice. ‘Well, it’s fixed up.’

  ‘I’m thankful to hear it.’

  ‘Only you must hurry: he’s leaving for the United States on Sunday. He would like to do it the day after tomorrow at latest, so as to have time to treat the case during the first few days.’

  ‘Right... Well then, I’ll tell Marcelle this very day, only it catches me a bit short, I shall have to find the money. How much does he want?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Sarah’s voice: ‘but he wants four thousand francs, cash down. I did tell him that you were rather hard up at the moment, but he wouldn’t budge. He’s a dirty Jew,’ she added with a laugh.

  Sarah was always brimming with superfluous compassion, but when she had undertaken to do anyone a service, she became as abrupt and bustling as a Sister of Charity. Mathieu was holding the receiver, a little away from his ear: ‘Four thousand francs,’ he thought, and he heard Sarah’s laugh crackle on the little black disc, with a positively nightmarish effect.

  ‘In two days from now? Right — I’ll fix it. Thank you, Sarah, you’re a treasure. Will you be at home this evening before dinner?’

  ‘All day.’

  ‘Good. I’ll be along. There are one or two things to arrange.’

  ‘Till this evening?’

  Mathieu emerged from the box.

  ‘I want to telephone, mademoiselle... No, it doesn’t matter, after all.’

  He threw a franc into a saucer and walked slowly upstairs. It wasn’t worth while ringing up Marcelle before he had settled the money question. ‘I’ll go and see Daniel at midday..’ He sat down again beside Ivich and looked at her without affection.

  ‘My headache is gone,’ she said politely.

  ‘I’m glad to bear it,’ said Mathieu.

  His heart felt sooty.

  Ivich threw a sidelong glance at him, through her long eyelashes. There was a blurred, coquettish smile upon her face.

  ‘We might... We might go and see the Gauguins after all.’

  ‘If you like,’ said Mathieu equably.

  They got up, and Mathieu noticed that Ivich’s glass was empty.

  ‘Taxi!’ he cried.

  ‘Not that one, it’s open, we shall have the wind in our faces.’

  ‘No,’ said Mathieu to the chauffeur: ‘drive on, it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘Stop that one,’ said Ivich; ‘it’s as neat as a travelling tabernacle for the Holy Sacrament, and besides it’s closed.’

  The taxi stopped, and Ivich got into it. ‘While I’m there,’ thought Mathieu, ‘I’ll ask Daniel for an extra thousand francs — that will see me to the end of the month.’

  ‘Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Faubourg Saint-Honoré.’

  He sat in silence beside Ivich. They were both ill at ease.

  Mathieu noticed near his feet three half-smoked gold-tipped cigarettes.

  ‘There’s been a very nervy person in this cab.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It was a woman,’ said Ivich, ‘I can see the marks of lipstick.’

  They smiled and fell silent. Mathieu said: ‘I once found a hundred francs in a taxi.’

  ‘You must have been pleased.’

  ‘Oh, I gave them to the chauffeur.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Ivich. ‘I should have kept them. Why did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mathieu.

  The taxi crossed the Place Saint-Michel.

  Mathieu was on the point of saying: ‘Look how green the Seine is,’ but he said nothing. Ivich suddenly remarked: ‘Boris suggested we might all three go to the Sumatra this evening — I should rather like to...’

  She turned her head, and was looking at Mathieu’s hair, tilting her mouth towards him with a touch of affectionate coquetry. Ivich was not precisely a flirt, but from time to time she assumed an affectionate air for the pleasure of sensing the heavy, fruit-like sleekness of her face. Mathieu thought it an irritating and rather silly pose.

  ‘I shall be glad to see Boris and to be with you,’ he said, ‘But what bothers me a little, as you know, is Lola: she can’t stand me.’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  A silence followed. It was as though they had both simultaneously realized that they were a man and a woman, enclosed together in a taxi. ‘It oughtn’t to be so,’ he said to himself with annoyance. And Ivich continued: ‘I don’t myself think that Lola is worth troubling about. She’s good-looking, and she sings well, that’s all.’

  ‘I find her sympathetic.’

  ‘Naturally. That’s your attitud
e, you always must be perfect. The moment people dislike you, you do your best to discover virtues in them. I don’t find her sympathetic,’ she added.

  ‘She is charming to you.’

  ‘She can’t behave otherwise: but I don’t like her, she’s always acting a part.’

  ‘Acting a part?’ said Mathieu, raising his eyebrows: ‘that’s the last thing I should have accused her of doing.’

  ‘It’s odd you shouldn’t have noticed it: she heaves sighs as large as herself to make people believe she’s in despair, and then orders herself a nice little dinner.’

  And she added with sly malice: ‘I should have thought that when people were in despair they didn’t mind dying: I’m always surprised when I see her adding up every penny she spends, and saving money.’

  ‘That doesn’t prevent her being desperate. It’s just what people do when they’re getting old: when they’re sick of themselves and their life, they think of money and take care of themselves.’

  ‘Well, one oughtn’t ever to get old,’ said Ivich, dryly.

  He looked at her puzzledly and hurriedly added: ‘You’re right, it isn’t nice to be old.’

  ‘Oh, but you aren’t any age,’ said Ivich. ‘I have the feeling that you have always been as you are now, you’ve got a kind of mineral youthfulness. I sometimes try to imagine what you were like as a boy, but I can’t.’

  ‘I had curly hair,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘Well, I picture you just as you are today, except for being a little smaller.’

  This time Ivich probably did not know that she was looking affectionate. Mathieu wanted to speak, but there was an odd irritation in his throat, and he was suddenly outside himself. Away behind him were Marcelle, Sarah, and the interminable hospital corridors in which he had been wandering since the morning, he was no longer anywhere at all; he felt free. The dense, warm mass of a summer day came close to him, and he longed to plunge headlong into it. For one more second he seemed suspended in the void, with an agonizing sense of freedom, and then, abruptly, he reached out his arm, took Ivich by the shoulders, and clasped her to him. Ivich yielded stiffly, all of a piece, as though she were losing her balance. She said nothing: and her face was utterly impassive.

  The taxi had entered the Rue de Rivoli, the arcades of the Louvre lumbered past the windows, like great doves in flight. It was hot — Mathieu felt a warm body against his side: through the front window he could see trees and a tricolour flag pendant from a mast. He remembered the action of a man he had seen once in the Rue Mouffetard. A decently dressed man with an absolutely grey face. The man had gone up to a provision-shop, he had gazed for a long time at a slice of cold meat on a plate in the open window, then he had reached out a hand and taken the piece of meat: he did so with apparent ease, he too must have felt free. The shop keeper had yelled, a policeman had appeared and removed the man, who seemed surprised. Ivich was still silent.

  ‘She’s criticizing me,’ thought Mathieu irritably.

  He leaned towards her: and to punish her, he laid his lips lightly against a cold, closed mouth: he was feeling defiant: Ivich was silent. Lifting his head he saw her eyes, and his passionate joy vanished. He thought: ‘A married man messing about with a young girl in a taxi,’ and his arm dropped, dead and flaccid: Ivich’s body straightened with a mechanical jerk, like a pendulum swinging back to equilibrium. ‘Now I’ve done it,’ said Mathieu, ‘she’ll never forgive me.’ He sat huddled in his seat wishing he might disintegrate. A policeman raised his baton, the taxi stopped. Mathieu looked straight in front of him, but he could not see the trees: he was looking at his love.

  It was love. This time, it was love. And Mathieu thought: ‘What have I done?’ Five minutes ago this love didn’t exist; there was between them a rare and precious feeling, without a name and not expressible in gestures. And he had, in fact, made a gesture, the only one that ought not to have been made, it had come spontaneously. A gesture, and this love had appeared before Mathieu, like some insistent and already commonplace entity. Ivich would from now on think that he loved her, she would think him like the rest: from now on, Mathieu would love Ivich, like the other women he had loved. ‘What is she thinking?’ She sat by his side, stiff and silent, and there was this gesture between them — ‘I hate being touched’ — this clumsy, affectionate gesture, already marked with the impalpable insistence of things past. She was furious, she despised him, she thought him like the rest. ‘That wasn’t what I wanted of her,’ he thought with despair. But even by this time he could no longer recall what he had wanted before. Love was there, compact and comfortable, with its simple desires and all its commonplace contrivings, and it was Mathieu who had brought it into being, in absolute freedom. ‘It isn’t true,’ he reflected vehemently: ‘I don’t desire her, I never have desired her.’ But he already knew that he was going to desire her. It always finishes like that, he would look at her legs and her breasts, and then, one fine day... In a flash he saw Marcelle outstretched on the bed, naked, with her eyes closed: he hated Marcelle.

  The taxi had stopped: Ivich opened the door and stepped out into the street. Mathieu did not follow her at once: he was absorbed in wide-eyed contemplation of this love of his, so new and yet already old, a married man’s love, sly, and shameful, humiliating for her, and, himself humiliated in advance, he already accepted it as a fatality. He got out at last, paid the fare and rejoined Ivich, who was waiting in the entrance. ‘If only she could forget.’ He threw a furtive glance at her, and caught a hard look on her face: ‘At the best, there is something between us that is ended,’ he thought. But he had no wish to stop loving her. They went into the Exhibition without exchanging a word.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘THE archangel,’ Marcelle yawned, sat up, shook her head, and this was her first thought: ‘The archangel is coming this evening.’ She liked his mysterious visits, but that day she thought of them without much pleasure. There was a fixed horror in the air about her, a midday horror. The room was filled with stale heat which had spent its force outside, and left its radiance in the folds of the curtain, and was stagnating there, inert and ominous like a human destiny. ‘If he knew, he is so austere that he would hate me.’ She had sat down on the edge of the bed, just like yesterday, when Mathieu was sitting naked at her side; she eyed her toes with distaste, and the previous evening lingered, impalpable, with its dead pink light, like the faded fragrance of a scent. ‘I couldn’t — I just couldn’t tell him.’ He would have said: ‘Right: very well, we’ll fix it’ — with a brisk and cheerful air, as though in the act of swallowing a dose of medicine. She knew that she could not have endured that face: it had stuck in her throat. She thought: ‘Midday!’ The ceiling was grey like the sky at dawn, but the heat was of midday. Marcelle went to bed late and was no longer acquainted with the morning hours; she sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose. Outside — broad daylight, and bright-coloured frocks. Mathieu was on the move outside in the gay and dusty whirl of a day which had begun without her, and already had a past. ‘He’s thinking about me, he’s doing all he can,’ she thought without affection. She was annoyed because she could imagine that robust, sunlit pity, the bustling, clumsy pity of a healthy man. She felt languid and clammy, still quite dishevelled from sleep: the familiar steel helmet gripped her head, there was a taste of blotting-paper in her mouth, a lukewarm feeling down her sides, and, beneath her arms, tipping the black hairs, beads of sweat. She felt sick, but restrained herself: her day had not yet begun, it was there, propped precariously against Marcelle, the least movement would bring it crashing down like an avalanche. She laughed sardonically and muttered: ‘Freedom!’

  A human being who wakened in the morning with a queasy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bed-time, had not much use for freedom. Freedom didn’t help a person to live. Delicate little feathers dipped in alo
es tickled the back of her throat, and then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue and drew her lips back. ‘I’m lucky, apparently some women are sick all day. At the second month: I bring up a little in the morning, and feel rather tired in the afternoon, but I keep going. Mother knew women who couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco, and that would be the last straw.’ She got up abruptly and ran to the basin: she vomited a foamy, turbid liquid, which looked rather like the slightly beaten white of an egg. Marcelle clutched the porcelain rim, and gazed at the frothing water. She smiled wryly, and murmured: ‘A memento of love.’ Then a vast metallic silence took possession of her head, and her day began. She was no longer thinking of anything. She ran her hand through her hair and waited: ‘I’m always sick twice in the morning.’ And then, quite suddenly, she had a vision of Mathieu’s face, his frank, determined look, when he had said: ‘Well, I suppose one gets rid of it, eh?’ and a flash of hate shot through her.

  It came. She first thought of butter, and was revolted; she seemed to be chewing a bit of yellow, rancid butter, then she felt something like an insistent laugh at the back of her throat, and leaned over the basin. A long filament hung from her lips, she had to cough it away. It did not disgust her, though she had been very ready to be disgusted with herself: last winter, when she was suffering from diarrhoea, she would not let Mathieu touch her, she was sure she smelt unpleasantly. She watched the dabs of mucus sliding slowly towards the drain-hole, leaving glossy, viscous tracks behind them, like snails. And she muttered: ‘It’s fantastic!’ She was not revolted; this was life, like the slimy efflorescences of spring, it was no more repulsive than the little dab of russet, odorous gum that tipped the buds. ‘It isn’t that that’s repulsive.’ She turned on a tap to sluice the basin, and slowly slipped out of her vest. ‘If I were an animal, I should be left alone.’ She could sink into that living languor, as into the embrace of a glorious, enveloping fatigue. She was not a fool. ‘One gets rid of it, eh?’ Since yesterday evening, she felt like a hunted quarry.