‘You are,’ said Judith, ‘a good scholar, you are a neophyte!’
Lorée turned to her, on the defense, said at once, ‘Please, may I say something? I didn’t mean any harm: I was just—funning: Pardon me, just a joke … There is no evidence that I can see for theor’ of secul’ return’.’ He stopped suddenly and relaxed in the low chair. His boots stretched out across the room. He appeared to be contemplating his folded hands, but everyone in the room became aware that he had no other interest at the moment but Henrietta. The conversation languished, mental life was difficult in that atmosphere; they had all been disintegrated and everything had been dislocated since the mammoth sat amongst them.
There was a ring at the door. Judith started and hurried to open it. ‘Who can it be now?’
At the door stood a woman of stone, with a face dug up from the grave. ‘Suzanne!’ exclaimed Adam.
‘Mme. Constant,’ said Judith. ‘Why, come in.’ Suzanne walked past Judith without a word, took off her hat, gloves, and coat and threw them on a bench. She walked to the middle of the chamber, threw herself into a reclining chair opposite Adam Constant and beside the stove, and said dryly, ‘Hello, Jean. I see you’ve got the usual female phalanx.’
Lorée, aghast, shrank into the back of his chair and surveyed them all as if they were wild animals.
‘Don’t you want some coffee, Suzanne?’ asked Judith. ‘You must be all in.’
‘Yes, I do, thank you. Yes, with milk and sugar.’ Judith put it in front of Suzanne who took it, tasted it, and after gulping it down set the cup on the stove. She darkled and said with lowered face, looking upwards, to Alphendéry, ‘What do you think, Monsieur, of a man who torments his wife like that? What do you think of a man who leaves his wife? Or do you think anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ laughed Alphendéry, trying to keep things going. ‘Tell me the man and I’ll tell you what kind of a scoundrel he is: every man is a separate kind of scoundrel when it comes to girls … We spend our lives figuring out only that!’
Suzanne laughed loudly at this, lifting her white teeth and the whites of her eyes into the light. ‘Ah, Monsieur, I see you are of my opinion! You must stick by me. All these others are against me …’
‘Don’t say that, Suzanne,’ pleaded Jean. ‘I’m not, Adam’s not. Nobody is, in fact.’
Suzanne savagely got up, went to the cupboard, and cut herself a piece of bread. ‘No one serves me: I serve myself. I take the pieces, don’t worry: I don’t say thank you for tag ends.’ She looked with a ferocious grin at Adam. ‘No tag ends.’ She looked at Henrietta. Henrietta paled, composed herself. Suzanne laughed. ‘Imagine, “The little gilded bitch.”’ She said to Lorée, ‘You’re Lorée, aren’t you? Aren’t you famous for your women-chasing? If they have a good time, I will too. Don’t worry, I’m not a novice.’ She came up next to him and grinned down at him with her frightful, greasy face, about which hung her long black hair in locks. ‘You like pretty girls, don’t you, Lorée? Look at all the wine he drank! Jean, give Lorée some more wine. I want to have a good time: I feel wild, wild tonight. Adam—a cigarette. Don’t stir your stumps: I’ll light it at the stove … Ha, ha,’ she put the cigarette in her mouth, clapped her hands, and walked in front of Lorée. Lorée was still watching her, on the qui vive, taking in the attitudes of the other people there. She burst into a long shriek of laughter. ‘Look at him, look at the professor looking at me to see if I’m crazy. I am! Take me, professor: see how I feel. Give the ugly girls a chance. Tell me, have you ever raped an ugly girl? Let’s have a good time. Look how frightened he is.’
‘Not frighten’,’ said the professor, giving her a hearty push.
‘Lorée,’ she said harshly, ‘just a filthy gourmet like the rest of the whoremasters: wants his chicken done up fancy. I don’t give a damn for you and your breed of alley lovers. I’ve got lovers enough. Ask Adam! Ha, ha. Haven’t I, Adam? Haven’t I slept with dozens of comrades, I get undressed with them in the room, don’t I? And you say nothing: because I’m mad. Don’t I? Tell them, Adam: how I torture you.’ She laughed low and long. ‘Why? Aren’t I right to live my own love, Messieurs? No one loves me. Don’t you think I’m right?’
‘If you’re happy, Madame,’ said Alphendéry; ‘but how can you upset Adam this way?’
‘It’s because he plays such rotten tricks on me, goes out with women, tells them all about me. Tells them he won’t marry me, tells them I’m hideous, that he hates me. Shrieks it out aloud in bars, till you can hear it over the street. Tells them about me: how I ruined his life … What about the time I fed you, fed you? Do you hear that, Lorée? He was out of work: I slaved for him day and night. I tramped the streets with him, going up and downstairs, begging, humiliating myself with him to get him work. I know all the insults, looks, rebukes, silences, moralities an ugly woman gets. I did it all for him … Ask him about the time he was sick: he had ptomaine poisoning. I looked after him; I sat up all night. How do you think I got this complexion? Not with a life of milk and roses … Roses! Not a single rose. It’s been a dog’s life. I’m not a woman but an old pack mule he’s sorry for: society for kindness to animals and he’s to be a saint for that! Not I. I’m not the one to stand all that! I’ll drink, slobber, caterwaul, and muck up and bawl him out as often as I want to. If he doesn’t like it, he can go and hang himself. I’ve slaved for him for ten years. He can go and talk grandly with his fine friends, his fine words, politics, economics: how sick I am of them!’ She laughed and said in a deeper voice, ‘I’m a woman. I want something out of life, too. I didn’t know I was well off when I was a virgin: I had to get myself tangled up with a sort of martyr-saint …’
‘You didn’t do so badly,’ said Adam calmly. ‘Don’t make such a noise, Suzanne.’
‘This is intolerab’,’ suddenly breathed Charles Lorée. He heaved himself round and up. ‘Mlle. Achitoph’, will you come with me? This wom’ is intolerab’. Why don’t you shut her up or shut her up?’ he asked Adam.
Suzanne got up and flung her arms as far round Lorée as they would go: ‘You are gigantic, Lorée.’ She placed her hands on his shoulders and sprang up to his face to give him a resounding kiss.
‘Going,’ said the professor. ‘Sorr’, Jean.’
‘Oh, sit down, Lorée,’ cried Jean bouncing up and taking him by the sleeve. ‘Please stay. Suzanne will go off the rampage, won’t you Suzanne?’
‘Can’t bear to see a wom’ raggin’ her husban’,’ breathed Lorée: ‘detestab’ upset me completel’. Why in publi’, why not wai’ till you get home?’ he asked Suzanne sternly.
‘Thanks for the prospect,’ said Adam. ‘She does, Lorée: she does both.’
Suzanne flung herself down in the chair. ‘All right! I’m sitting down. Sit down everyone and enjoy yourself. I’m sure I am.’ She smoked like a chimney with a furious sarcastic expression.
‘I’ll get you people some sandwiches,’ said Judith.
‘You go and help her, Adam,’ Jean murmured.
Adam rose with a smile. Suzanne flung her cigarette down. ‘Alphendéry! you see that? This is a conspiracy: Judith is in love with Adam and Jean like a fool wants to give them a minute alone. I see through you all. Your piecrust conspiracies. I know what’s boiling in all your pots! So do we all: but everyone’s too much a fool to say it. Sit down, Adam.’
‘Why, Suzanne,’ Judith was dignified, ‘don’t talk like that. It isn’t true: I don’t see why Adam can’t help me. There are six people here.’
Suzanne became more energetic, throwing wild anxious glances at them all. ‘Lorée, I’m abandoned. Help me: stop him from going out. She’s pregnant, look at her, and she wants my husband. What are they going to the kitchen for? What do you think? I know. Don’t let them go, Jean.’
Adam, probably without thinking, moved off the bench and took a step towards the kitchen where Judith was juggling crockery. Suzanne made a
bound and let out a cry, her cigarette falling to the floor. ‘Don’t you go out to her!’
‘Oh, Suzanne,’ said Jean ashamed. She turned on him. ‘You leave me alone: you’ve fooled round with enough girls in your time. I won’t stand for anything like that in Adam!’
Lorée rolled himself out of the chair again, ‘Can’ stay, Jean,’ he said. ‘Got lectu’ prepa’ tomorro’. You wan’ go, too, Mlle. Achitophel’?’
‘What are you so anxious to drag her out for, Lorée?’ Suzanne heckled. ‘I can’t imagine: none of us can imagine what you’ll do as soon as you get her on the stairs. The courtyard’s dark, too. Nobody much lives in the Rue du Pont de Lodi. Nice district for gallant professors and the strumpet daughters of the bourgeoisie. Where did your father get his money, Mademoiselle? Tell me that! Out of sending white women out to Buenos Aires. I know, out of selling working women on the quays in Antwerp. He knows it pretty well, eh. Out of buying up run-down property and letting it out for sweatshops till an entrepreneur comes along to put up a new building for factory girls to sweat in or a new cinema for young lovesick kittens to fondle their boys in. Out of buying and selling little girls in China, out of the silk crop, eh, Yes, yes. I know. Your pretty manners, your little red nails, your big almond eyes, your little fern-smelling curls: I know. Go away, get out of my sight, you, you, get out with your sheep’s-eyes professor, you with a diploma: do your picking-up somewhere else than round my husband. Lorée wants to go on a necking party …’
‘Shut up, Suzanne,’ cried Adam.
She smiled broadly and relapsed into silence. ‘Intolerab’,’ murmured the professor. ‘Come, come, Henriett’. Take you home.’
‘In a taxi,’ screeched the possessed woman, ‘in a taxi! Do.’ She watched them both hungrily as they shook hands all round: Henrietta even held out her hand to Suzanne and Suzanne took it and shook it and then pushed it away with a sound of disgust. ‘Bread and butter,’ she jeered, ‘bread and butter.’ The professor turned his back on her. ‘Good night,’ she called after him: but he refused to say a word and blundered out the door with Jean, Adam and Alphendéry after him in a contrite, sorrowing bundle. She smoked and smiled to herself.
‘Well, he got a fright,’ she announced, when they returned.
‘You are a tartar, Suzanne,’ said Adam. ‘You have no right to behave like that in Jean’s house especially. Why insult Henrietta?’
‘To throw her into the arms of Lorée and get her out of your way,’ she said, between laughs. ‘I saw he had his eyes glued on her and she was frothing at the mouth with baby veneration for ‘the great man.’ Suzanne the matchmaker. Eh, it’s not the first. I’ve put more than one couple to bed … Thanks, Judith. I need this tea. I’m dry, I’m sick. God, what a thing life is! You just begin to know what passion really is when your body’s too sick and old to be able to stand it any more. You’ll all be the same as me in ten-fifteen years’ time, youngsters. Adam’s going to commit suicide some way or another, either get chucked out of the party, or go and fight and get his chump head blown off and all my troubles will be over. Judith’s going to be the mother of bouncing children, a real hen and chickens, keeping Jean in her apron strings, destroying all his work until she’s got him stuck at the other end of a corncob pipe and humanity’s forgotten; Jean’s going to slow down, turn out good-fellow trash that he’ll be praised for and that’ll be thrown into the dustbin by even his own children. Alphendéry, you sweetbread, Alphendéry,’ she shrugged her shoulders, laughed, her head thrown back, blowing smoke into the air. ‘Oh, God, what a joke when I think what life will be for all of you! Such jelly fish. I frighten you all with my tantrums. You really believe I’m mad. No. I’m just strong. I break him and myself because I’m too strong. I’m a female gorilla amongst chimpanzees. Look,’ she crouched forward on the chair, let her arms hang, ‘look, it’s striking isn’t it ? A gorilla-ess.’ She clenched her teeth. ‘I make the bars of my cage dance, all right.’ She began her infernal smoking again … After they had eaten and drunk again, she subsided and sat there musing savagely, throned on her squat hips while the others talked in fragments, softly and without confidence, politely, as if they had just met. They all feared the insane goddess of darkness squatting there and dreaming of inchoate things. When it was time to go, she took a fancy to stay there, but Adam roughly hustled her out with the others: they heard her ringing insults over the courtyard, and Alphendéry’s good-humored answers. Jean and Judith looked at each other, speechless, smiling in a dazzled way.
‘Chronic jealousy,’ said Judith at last.
‘Curious brute,’ commented Jean. ‘Yes, I did think she was jealous. When she walked in, I thought it was some archaic corpse resurrected, maybe a woman of the Parisii from far under the Arènes de Lutèce: I shuddered.’
‘We all shuddered: my heart stopped.’
‘Adam’s gorgon.’
The next day Adam murmured to Alphendéry about Suzanne, ‘I venerate her courage in loving: most women are such beaten dogs. They have such immense passion and they give vent to such poor, sniveling words. Nothing in the world seems to me so beautiful as woman’s love for man, nothing is so deformed. You understand.’
‘When will your poems be out, Adam?’
‘In the autumn, just before I go to Shanghai.’
‘I’m going to miss you, Adam.’
‘And I you, Michel: what a good fellow you are! You have the courage to be kind and unassuming. Few have it.’
* * *
Scene Sixty: Marianne
The Raccamonds came to the Hallers’ apartment, invited to dinner. No one was at home. Marianne looked at the letter. ‘How did we make the mistake? How did we get the letter so late?’ Marianne fretted over this problem the whole evening: she had had a bad fright. ‘Show me the letter … But Aristide, it’s a month old. It must have come while I was in London.’
‘I was so preoccupied, I left letters in my pockets, I remember, for days.’
‘It’s unheard of! Why? What took up your time so much?’
‘You know, while you were away, I began to hear things about Bertillon—the clients said he plunged on the pound and had an arrangement with Carrière: so I went to Carrière. Yes, it’s true. If the pound slides any more, goodness knows what he will have to pay; now it comes to several millions, I guess … Can he pay? … I did not sleep at night. At my age, I could not stand another fiasco, you see. So I visited Carrière. At the same time, Carrière—he’s a dirty beast, too: I hear it is true that a boy was killed at one of his orgies. Is that the sort of man to be mixed up with? No. But needs must when the devil drives. They are all brutes.’
A gross mocking line formed round her mouth. ‘And what are we? Anyone looking at us from the outside—your history with Claude Brothers, our marriage a marriage of arrangement, because of my connection with Czorvocky and Marcuzo, your mistress Lucienne’s child given over to us because she couldn’t support him in style, her second child born after our marriage, brought up a slum child with heavy skull and starting eyes and anemia—I shed my illusions when I—well, after my son was born. I don’t understand how you can still deceive yourself. Why believe in anything? I don’t have to. Why pretend there is a world of men different from the ones you call brutes, in finance. You really think that, say, painters or actors are finer and more generous? There are people who go through life with their hands over their eyes: they are sure to blunder into dung quicker than the others. Life is only sordid if you’re looking for something else. I see what there is to do and I’m going to do it.’
‘At our age? You think one can start again at our age? I call that an illusion.’
‘Age? I’m getting stronger every year. I’m going into finance. It’s a splendid profession: hard work, insecurity, plunges, great chances, success, if you’ve got the right mind for it.’
He looked guilty. ‘My dear, while you were away a letter came from a jour
nalist. I put it somewhere. I don’t know.’
She looked at him suspiciously and with contempt, ‘You were certainly in a state.’
He took a resolve. ‘Marianne, really, I don’t want you to do this: it isn’t fit for a woman. You think you’re made of tough material. You don’t know: you would be miserable. And think of me. No home. Stock market, overdrafts at the office, bourse in the streets, tips in the cafés, spying out personalities in the restaurants, political scandal in the Bois on Sundays, and at home—more finance … No. It’s a fantasy.’
She looked at him with a lift of the head and a faint smile: she thought (so intensely that she forgot to answer), ‘No, but you don’t think I have to depend on you, do you? I have passed the time when I asked myself with astonishment why you left Lucienne (perfectly charming, after all), for me. I can get men. I like you, but looking forward to fifty empty years to please you is another thing …’ She felt impatient and bit her lip, ‘God in Heaven,’ she thought, ‘I understand a pure happy-go-lucky wastrel: he understands life and won’t play the game; but I have no patience with a gloomy sentimental fanatic, like him!’
Aristide, surprised that she did not answer him, half seized the expression on her face: he sat up. ‘Marianne, you must not do this. I don’t want it. If you do, I’ll take you away from the city: we’ll go back to Picardy.’
For a fraction of a minute, she shivered and recalled the morning twilight of her life with Aristide. Odd, she thought: and softened. He was a good husband: and easy. Or had it always been so easy as it was now? She did not remember any more. Now Aristide was an old overcoat, good for the storms, good for warmth, but bulky, frayed, soiled, broken-backed. ‘Still, I’ll go by easy stages,’ she thought. ‘I’ll drop the pilot when I’m sure I know the channel.’
He tried to keep up his authority. ‘Two in the family is too much.’ She smiled. ‘You will see, Aristide: it will not be so bad as you think. And then, think, we need more money. A small example: I only mention it to show you. I have no good fur coat. Oh, don’t think that what other women think bothers me. But still. Raoul—that lummox will always be in hot water. Until they settle down and we have grandchildren, we must have a full life. I won’t be the old mother who has to be fed pap … But only if we have enough money. You don’t think of that?’ (Raoul, he thought: she doesn’t call that an illusion then; of all the misbegotten pickpockets—however: a woman’s son, that’s an illusion so solid I suppose you must call it a reality.)
House of All Nations Page 57
