The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  “I must go. Tell her, tell her to bring the keys.”

  “I will do that. Monsieur is not French?”

  “I’m an American,” said George, furious at the insinuation.

  “An American? But I should have said—”

  “Good-bye!” cried George, striding off.

  “He’s a German for sure,” said the man to himself, turning; “it’s the accent. And then no American can speak French. Well—the little one, the girl—yes—” He sat down at the window and watched the street. At any moment she might go past with the four beautiful perverse women who had taken her up.

  George looked for her day and night, whenever he could. He knew Linda well by this time. One day, he sat down to eat in a little cheap restaurant in the Rue du Dragon. He was tired out. He sat on the bench at a table for two. The restaurant, catering chiefly to poor American students, served meals in single dishes cheap and served fast, so that they could get in three or four sittings during the lunch-hour. Americans liked it that way, and so did George. He was too impatient to sit for hours over a meal unless he had an interesting companion, like Martin Dean, someone who could give him information. He ate escalope viennoise, something he never had at home, ate it fast, drank some water and was looking for the waitress to pay, when someone came up to the little table.

  “I’m just going,” he said looking up. It was Linda. “Oh, my God! Linda!”

  “May I sit down?” she said, as if fatigued.

  “Sit down! Eat something. You look used up.”

  She sat down, took the menu from the waitress. “Do you want to pay, monsieur?”

  “No, no, mademoiselle is going to have lunch. What will you eat, Linda?”

  Linda put down the menu. “I don’t know the names of French food. What is good?” she said with lassitude to the waitress.

  The waitress mentioned a few dishes that were still to be had. “Yes, that,” she said, stopping the waitress; “that—or if it’s off, anything.”

  “Do you like bœuf à la mode?”

  “Bœuf is beef, I need some meat.”

  “Where have you been, my dearest? I have been looking for you for two months.”

  She was looking around the restaurant with interest. She turned her thin pale face to him and took off her glasses. He looked into her eyes with pain. The eyes were sunken and sick; they were like half-dried raisins; and in them was hopeless misery. She was thinking of suicide.

  George kept talking lightly and kindly while he pondered. “Where are you living, Lin?”

  “Nowhere. I have just come out of hospital,” she said indifferently.

  “What were you in hospital for?”

  “I had boils. I was covered in boils. I suppose it was the food.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “People came to see me. I didn’t want them to. I looked bad.” She ate the beef when it was brought. “It is very good,” she said to him.

  “What hospital was it?”

  “I don’t know. They took me there. They looked after me.”

  “Who took you?”

  “Some women. They were good to me.”

  Sitting straight, he looked at her anxiously, but did not probe. She ordered some dessert, looked at him and her eyes were now fuller; but old, tired. “I thought I was going to die and if I had told my father he would have come straight over and I couldn’t do that.”

  “Because he’s busy?”

  “I couldn’t let him see me like that.” She lowered her eyes and bent down to her handbag. She brought out his keys and handed them to him. “I found them. I had rolled them in a stocking and put them in one of the pockets of my skirt. They dropped right down to the bottom and I didn’t feel them till I put my skirt on today. Then I was so—” She laughed for the first time. “I had so little strength I felt the weight! And I took them out. I was going to bring them to you.” After a silence she said, “I went to the American Express and I got some letters from home. There’s a hundred dollars they sent me and they tell me to come home. My father is angry with me. Mother says to come home, even if I haven’t got my degree. They sent someone to look for me last month, a tourist, and he couldn’t find me and he went to the Sorbonne and couldn’t find me there. So I had better go home. But they won’t send me the ticket. They’ll only send it to the Deans. They don’t trust me. They think I’ll sell the ticket.” And again she looked around vaguely, mournfully, looking at the floor. She was saying something he didn’t catch. She looked sideways up at him, “They don’t love me; they don’t care about me.” She was silent and he could not get her to speak again. She simply shook her head.

  “Lin, let’s go home.”

  She got up, put on her glasses and strolled out after him. She was wearing the long tartan skirt with the deep pockets. When she got out she said, “I never used to take anything from that restaurant, because they have such bad forks and knives; but I took one this time, because they give us such bad things; they treat Americans like Algerians.”

  He took it from her. “I’ll give it back.” He took her to a café, gave her coffee and brandy and explained to her that she stole because she felt miserable and homeless, of no account. She would come home with him; he’d buy her her ticket to New York and she would go there to wait for him. She lived in New York and he had had an address there for years. They could marry there. “You go to your parents, tell them you’re engaged. I will come as soon as I’ve finished this assignment. I must go back in any case because of my citizenship.”

  She agreed to this, and they returned to his lodgings.

  “You must stay there, Lin, till I make all the arrangements; you need rest and reassurance. It’ll be on the up and up. We’ll be married soon. I won’t bother you.”

  “I can work for you,” she said quickly. “I’ll do your typing. I’m a good typist, but no foreign languages. I don’t like them.”

  She was no sooner there than she sat down at the typewriter and began typing out the last chapter of his refugee book.

  The next day he left her at it, when he went out for a lunch appointment with Martin Dean who had come into Paris for his doctor. She said she did not want to see him. “Better not. He’ll ask me things. He’ll write to my parents. They’re my father’s friends, not mine. Besides”—she looked at him plainly—“there are a lot of people I don’t want to see any more. I’m tired of it.” She hesitated, but added, “You see, in the hospital I thought I’d die and I wouldn’t see my parents or anyone again. I didn’t care for the women either, though they were kind to me. I don’t love anyone,” she said, looking at him and shaking her head slightly. “I know that now. That is what is wrong with me. I don’t want to see all those people I never loved. It makes me miserable. I suppose I had better get married.”

  “You mean, I am your new life: all the rest is gone?”

  She did not answer.

  The next day, he met Martin Dean. They went to a restaurant halfway along the block. It was cheap and the food poor, but Martin praised the cheapness and the food, admired the students who were working as waiters; and George took no notice of what he was eating. They had neither wine nor bread. “It costs practically nothing to eat in Paris,” said Martin happily.

  “But when I was a child they said pig’s liver and pig’s brain sent you mad; what do you think? A superstition?” said George. They had both tried the pig’s kidneys.

  “That was before hygienic sties,” said Martin.

  “But there was a man in New York, one summer, who claimed trichinosis was superstition and ate raw pig’s liver and went mad and died,” said George, in a worried tone.

  “It was raw. Our kidneys were cooked to a fare-thee-well,” laughed Martin.

  They walked back towards George’s quarters. “You worry about your health because you live alone,” said Martin. “All bachelors worry about their health.”

  “I am going to marry Linda, your friend’s daughter,” said George. “She is a good age
, twenty-two and quiet; and she wants to forget all the past. She wants to live for me. She has nothing else. I never thought of that before. One night, the other night, I stopped typing. I leaned back and thought, I am going to be happy. It never happened before. I loved them, I married them, but I never looked ahead and thought of being happy. It is not my age,” he said hastily, “it is the girl. Wait while I drop in my airmail. Airmail ruins me. I was up till three, I hardly slept.”

  They walked on; and went up and down a few steps in the garden alley which leads to the Luxemburg Gardens. The whole country was still talking about the Hammond affair; and Martin asked whether George thought there was any connection between it and other murders of foreigners in lonely places that summer—on a seabeach, in a forest, on a road in the Pyrenees. “I don’t know,” said George; “but I kept out of it. I didn’t want to end up a trunk murder; and there was that in it. Too many foreign services. I have to dig out the bones, name names or I have no following; and I couldn’t do that. I could have made thousands. I hate all this; I hate murder; but it is my business.”

  “You once taught history in a university,” said Martin, with slight reproach.

  “I often wanted to go back, but where? Too much time has passed. I’m out of it; and this other business I can do. And I make more.”

  “But you spend more in this bohemian life.”

  “I can’t settle down, I can’t lead what they call a normal life. It would be the end of me,” cried George. “Linda does not want a home, she does not want children. She will live anywhere. I must never settle down. Never! It’s fatal. People who settle down get old. I’m ageless this way. What is to stop me?” Suddenly he said eagerly, “I have my keys: come and see my Mercedes. I’ll run you out to St. Germain; we can take Linda along, and see Laura.”

  They turned and walked up the avenue again. Out of an apartment on the third floor of a white-faced building on one side came stirring music, a quartet led by a strident violin. After a few steps George stopped. “What’s that? I know that. It gets to you. It hurts you. It has a dreadful message.”

  “It’s Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’.”

  “My God! Death and the Maiden! This little girl was eleven years old and they murdered her too. What sort of men were they? It’s a Feme type of murder. I made up my mind to get them; and no sooner had I got down there, then I knew. It was known. I could not get them. Too big for me. And it presses down on me. She cries to me.”

  “Yes, there was a clue,” said Martin, with interest.

  “Don’t talk about it!” George said.

  “The maiden always dies and it is sad for us,” said Martin in a jolly tone to distract George.

  “What do you mean?” he cried.

  Martin said, “A woman can’t be, until a girl dies; I don’t mean it indecently. I mean the sprites that girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.”

  “Women!” said George stormily. “No, there is not a dead girl in them. They are just clay. When the girl dies there is nothing. Just an army of aunts and mothers, midwives and charwomen.”

  “And yet, George, you have many true friends among women; Clare Cane, Mrs. Branch, you’re like a brother to Laura. I wouldn’t put up with women shacking down with me, or trouble about that sprite from Lausanne. I’m not nearly the knight errant you are and yet I love real women—I see nothing in girls. They’re undeveloped as souls.”

  “I never think about these things,” said George energetically. “It doesn’t help. I have no time to think. I must write my stories without sentiment, and how I see them. I see girls without sentiment, but I see how beautiful they are. I cannot marry a woman who is a dead girl. I must marry a living beautiful wonderful girl. I am going to marry Linda. She will never know what she wants. I am going to make her know.”

  “Well, it’s a relief to us, George.”

  George exhibited the car, and ran Martin to the station in it. Then he went back to his lodgings to take Linda out for a spin. He left the car outside and started up the stairs. He stopped. There were voices in his rooms; and one of them was Barby’s. He ran upstairs.

  There was Barby standing in the middle of the room, in a smart New York dress, her yellow hair piled and lacquered, holding forth. Linda was in a corner of the sofa, entranced. Against the window stood a graceful dark man about thirty-four. He was looking out of the window and at the same time holding a hand tenderly. The hand, of white ivory, with a smooth finish, like young flesh, was cut off at the wrist, but with such art that it seemed living and delightful.

  Barby was saying, “This man lives in the cemetery, in the lodge-gate and he adores me; he told me there are dozens of real art masterpieces he can get for me. I pay him two or three thousand francs or even four or five hundred. I take them to New York and I can sell them for ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand—any price. I don’t go to the big galleries, I go to a little gallery on Sixth or Seventh Avenue or somewhere in Newark. I just tell someone, I pay someone commission and I can make all my expenses and big money. Then I’ll set up a big gallery on Fifth Avenue—”

  The man at the window stopped and kissed the ivory hand. He saw George.

  “Barby!” said George, “what are you doing there?”

  “Oh, she has some wonderful paintings,” said Linda.

  “Georgie, baby,” said Barby, turning and rushing to him. “We have just got off the plane from Vienna. I went straight to Asnières because I got this tip. If you want to go in with me, baby, you can. This is my husband, George Paul, Dimitri; George, this is Prince Dimitri, my partner. Georgie darling, come into the bedroom. I want to talk to you.”

  “Talk here,” said George.

  “I can’t, baby darling, I must tell you something. Do come. There, I must give my blue-eyed baby a kiss.” She reached up and kissed him on the mouth and pulling at his hand began to drag him into the small room on the landing towards George’s tiny bedroom.

  “Get away, Barby, I’m not going with you.”

  Barby stopped and looked downstairs. “Pie-otter!” she cried, “is that yours? You got the Mercedes!”

  “Oh, my God,” said George.

  She rushed to the Prince and took his arm, “Dimitri, darling, come and see George’s Mercedes!” The Prince stepped along with her, with a faint agreeable smile, leaving the hand on the table, where it shone in the afternoon light. They admired the car and Barby called out to George for the keys.

  “Pie-otter! I must try her. Let me take Dimitri round the block.”

  “What block?” said George sourly. “You mean round Paris.”

  “If you don’t trust me, baby, you can drive us yourself. But I’d like to feel her myself.”

  “No,” said George, “you are not driving and I am not driving. Come upstairs and tell me what you want. Because you must get out of here, Barby: I am busy.”

  Barby said that she had thought he was out of town and that she and Prince Dmitri could stay at his place overnight. “Who is that beautiful long girl? Are you going to marry her? Does she live here? Then we will have to go to a hotel. It is only till tomorrow, George. I am taking the plane to New York. But I need money.”

  “Nothing doing,” said George. “I just sent you five hundred dollars. Where is that?”

  “It is just that, George. It is not enough now. I need funds. I have this wonderful business, a tipoff I had. You know everybody in the States is buying art masterpieces from Europe, Utrillos, van Goghs, Cézannes, and all those, and giving them to the local art gallery. It comes off their income tax. They don’t mind what they pay, it comes off the income tax. And they don’t get in experts; they don’t mind. They want to pay high prices and get a brass plate up in the museum or school. Well, I heard of this man in the cemetery—”

  “What man? What cemetery?” George was interjecting.

  “Baby darling, listen. You know your baby can unearth anything. I had a tipof
f and I went along and this man—I can’t tell you where he is or who, baby, of course—has dozens of art masterpieces that he’ll sell me for a few dollars any time I come along. He can’t tell me exactly where he found them but it’s in a mausoleum, a derelict vault in the cemetery grounds. They’re stacked there. So I bought a few, some Utrillos and van Goghs; and I’m leaving them here with you, baby, unless I can take them with me tomorrow. I want to take them on the plane with me, so I can make a quick sale. I know someone in New York is waiting for me. And I’ll get the money, I’ll get fifty thousand or more dollars as soon as I land. I’ll fly straight back, baby, and pay you back.”

  “You won’t pay me back, because I’m not lending you any money,” shouted George. “And who is this man? What has he to do with it, this Prince?”

  “Prince Dimitri is my partner. Now do come uptairs, Georgie, I must talk to you about something; about business. I want to show you the paintings.”

  George returned with them upstairs and went inside with her, Barby shutting the two intervening doors.

  Prince Dimitri sauntered in, took the hand from the table and brought it over to Linda. He sat beside her, at a little distance. He spoke a graceful English, with a pretty foreign accent, not Teutonic, not Slavic. “My wife is a beautiful girl,” he said with a smile to Linda; “and this is a copy of her hand. I have to travel so much for my business, and I cannot have her with me. She loves her home and her parents. We live on a little estate; it is not a park, only a garden and some acres of grass and trees—and she loves it. She loves me too and I love her. You see, because I cannot take her with me, I asked a friend of mine, who is an artist, to make me a copy of her right hand. I take it everywhere with me.” He held the hand with respectful tenderness, looking at it. “Would you like to take it?” he asked, giving the hand a slight movement towards her. Linda took it and turned it over.

  “It is beautiful,” she said, “like a real hand.”