Martha in Paris

by Margery Sharp

  “Domned if it ain’t the Young Pachyderm!” acknowledged Mr. Punshon.—How such a flight of fancy ever occurred to him was a mystery. Possibly he’d once subscribed to an encyclopaedia in monthly parts; and Martha’s personality, even as a child, had always something ruthless and tough-carapaced about it. Nonetheless, for Mr. Punshon, it was a remarkable, also uncommonly percipient, flight of fancy …

  “I’ve just come in to say good-bye,” said Martha.

  “You said good-bye before,” objected Mr. Punshon. “Several years ago I remember you coming in to say good-bye.”

  “That was when I was going to Richmond,” said Martha. “Now I’m going to Paris.”

  Upon Mr. Punshon the news didn’t seem to make any impression at all. He was so old, Paris and Richmond were all one to him. In either, a Young Pachyderm was safely removed from his purlieus.—How she’d glared, at good paying heels-while-you-waiters, if they got between her and the tobacco-jar! Mr. Punshon often thought he’d lost quite a bit of trade by it; couldn’t think now why he’d let her come—except that she was such a Young Pachyderm.

  “In France,” added Martha.

  —Yet he’d even shared his papers of fish-and-chips with her, recalled Mr. Punshon: an encouragement if there ever was one. Sometimes when the light was bad, recalled Mr. Punshon, they’d had quite a pleasant time going through his album together. (Like all cobblers he was a great politician; the cartoons pasted in his album, or scrap-book, ran from 1830 on. Martha had liked best the earliest and crudest.) Slowly, touched by this recollection, Mr. Punshon groped beneath his bench and hauled up the stout red volume, and fumbled it open at a Napoleon the Third, by Tenniel, in the act of defying the Austrian eagle.

  “There’s a Frenchy for you!” said Mr. Punshon triumphantly.

  At that moment, however, the door opened again. (Both Martha’s friends were men of affairs.) The woman who entered at once sat down and removed her shoes—evidently a heels-while-you-waiter. She glanced at Martha impatiently; nor did Mr. Punshon, pushing his spectacles down on his nose again, and reaching for a card of quarter-rubbers, seem anxious to detain Martha longer.

  “Well, good-bye,” said Mr. Punshon.

  “Good-bye,” said Martha. “Mr. Johnson told me not to drink tap-water.”

  “My goodness, where’s she off to—the North Pole?” put in the woman disagreeably.

  “No, Paris,” said Martha—glaring.

  “That’s right, Paris,” agreed Mr. Punshon hastily. Still, he did at last perceive it an occasion for some parting word; and if he couldn’t match Mr. Johnson’s precision, did his vague, aged best.

  “Mind you don’t come to harm,” said Mr. Punshon.

  6

  Martha tramped on, now towards Alcock Road. She hadn’t intended to go there, but there was something she suddenly remembered and wanted to look at. This was not the modest shelter of her youth; she passed by No. 5 without an upward glance at what had once been her attic-window, as without a sentimental thought for the fresco of rabbits lovingly applied by her Aunt Dolores to the walls within. What she sought was a certain grating in the gutter, whose bars, seen close to (as by one squatting on the curb), could be made, by a shift of eye-focus, to advance or retreat in the likeness of a pillared temple or a prison gate.—There it was, just past the letter-box; down Martha squatted; and in ten minutes of steady contemplation bade a final farewell to her childhood.

  Chapter Two

  Martha travelled to Paris alone with Mr. Joyce.—There was some little difficulty about this: at first both Harry and Dolores proposed accompanying them. Only the latter admitted her motive, which was personally to place Martha in the hands of Madame Dubois, but in fact it aroused less sympathy, in the principals, than did Harry’s unspoken but perfectly apparent notion of a bit of a jolly in Gay Paree.—“But wouldn’t it be nicer, Mr. Joyce,” pleaded Dolores, “for Madame to see Martha has someone belonging to her?” “She will see Martha has me belonging to her,” retorted Mr. Joyce—and glancing percipiently at his friend added kindly, “Perhaps another time.”

  It was Mr. Joyce who paid the piper. He and Martha travelled to Paris by themselves.

  They took the long sea passage from Newhaven to Dieppe. This was a pure piece of aesthetic sentimentalism on Mr. Joyce’s part; he had a fancy to set Martha’s feet for the first time on French soil in the prints of Boudin and Renoir, Pissarro and Sickert. In the face of Martha’s peculiarly stolid demeanour, however, he kept his own counsel on the point; also, though fully alive to the occasion’s momentousness, refrained from giving her advice. He suspected that during the last few days Martha’d had as much advice as she could digest, from her Aunt Dolores. So Martha had—though couched in such genteelly ambiguous terms as to leave no more solid residue than a warning against red wine. Since this was in direct opposition to the advice of Mr. Johnson (who besides having actually been to France was in Martha’s opinion the more trustworthy mentor), she sensibly dismissed it from mind; all the same, her mind was temporarily closed to any more advice whatever. Mr. Joyce’s taciturnity, in the train and then during the crossing, was thus very welcome; while Martha herself found nothing much to say either.

  She rarely did.

  Ensconced in his deck-chair, with leisure for reflection, Mr. Joyce looked at her thoughtfully. He had known her half her life: at the deepest level they were intimates: superficially, Martha never showed the least special regard for him. But then for whom did she show any special regard? Not for her aunt—whose charity had been little short of quixotic; nor for Harry Gibson, who might well have objected to so large a cuckoo in the conjugal nest. “She takes us all for granted,” thought Mr. Joyce. “She would cut us all up for india-rubber, if she needed india-rubber and we were made of india-rubber. Which is as it should be,” thought Mr. Joyce. “What are gratitude, and affection, and family-ties, to an artist, but so much clutter?”

  “Are you feeling sea-sick?” asked Martha.

  Mr. Joyce, unaware that he had sighed, shook his head.

  “Are you?”

  “No,” said Martha, relapsing into silence again.

  Mr. Joyce continued to contemplate her; his thoughts now taking a slightly different turn. Martha’s single family-tie, with her aunt, was of course clear to him; so in a sense was her parentage. She was the fruit of Dolores’ brother, who had been an employee in the Post Office, by a female employee in the Post Office; but how the deuce, wondered Mr. Joyce, not for the first time, had they managed to produce between them an offspring he was prepared to stake to the tune of some four hundred pounds a year (let alone all he’d, staked on her before), to study art in Paris? The only answer was that the wind bloweth where it listeth; and hadn’t Renoir been the son of a tailor?

  “These next two years will show,” thought Mr. Joyce. “Sink or swim!”

  On one point at least he felt entire confidence. Now contemplating Martha’s person—her portly figure all the portlier for a new navy serge top-coat too bulky to pack, her broad plain face surmounted by a sort of knitted tea-cosy—Mr. Joyce saw no slightest danger of her coming, in Dolores’ sense, to harm.

  2

  “That’s France,” said Mr. Joyce. “How does it strike you?”

  Martha stumped over to the rail. They were entering Dieppe harbour. It was her first glimpse of foreign soil: the first time she’d ever seen any flag flying but the Union Jack. How different, from that methodical combination of two defeated and one triumphant standards, the gay simplicity of the tricolor! How animated, too, the dockside scene, how promising of desperate risk (rather than of baggage safely conveyed under union rules), the jostle of blue-bloused porters! Rare is the British islander, one in a thousand, who does not feel himself, at such a first approach, on the threshold of new experiences, or at least on the threshold of a jolly.—Martha was that thousandth.

  “The light’s good,” said Martha.

  “That will do for the moment,” said Mr. Joyce.

  On the train
that bore them to Paris, Martha also for the first time encountered, and did appreciate, mirabelle-jam. Sugar gives energy, which for all her phlegm Martha was beginning to feel the need of: the small ovoid shapes, though still vaguely apparent, were too amorphous to please her eye; for colour (in this case dark amber varnished with gold), she had as yet no eye at all; but to her palate it was the sugariest confection Martha had ever tasted. She scraped her own pot to the bottom, also Mr. Joyce’s; and arrived at the Gare du Nord still licking her fingers. They were clean only just in time (after a final polish on Mr. Joyce’s handkerchief in the taxi) to receive unadhesively the hand so cordially extended by Madame Dubois.

  3

  “And so this,” cried Madame Dubois, “is to be our little English friend!”

  She was the shape of a wooden clothes-peg. From the small round head with its scraped-back grey hair Madame Dubois’ silhouette slightly broadened to include narrow shoulders and flat bust, slightly indented at the waist, then continued as narrowly to ground level, which her skirts accurately kissed. Martha had plenty of time to observe this (standing a pace behind Mr. Joyce in the dim corridor of an apartment in the rue de Vaugirard), because Madame Dubois spoke in French, so that Martha’s eyes weren’t distracted by her ears. She just got the general drift.—She also subconsciously recognized, in the Frenchwoman’s manner, something which it would have been unkind to call obsequious, but which undoubtedly suggested that any protégé of Mr. Joyce’s had the upper hand.

  “One does not forget,” Madame Dubois was in fact continuing, “to whose kindness the publication of my poor husband’s monograph on Chardin was so largely due! If only he were still with us to express his renewed thanks! Now we will see Mademoiselle’s room—which one trusts she will not find too simple, after the luxury to which she is undoubtedly accustomed.”

  Martha in fact liked the look of the large bare room very well. (Both which attributes, size and bareness, accounted for by its being actually the room of Madame’s daughter Angèle. When Angèle moved out in favour of Martha she took all sorts of things with her—such as a screen she had herself pen-painted with peacocks, and an Algerian leather pouffe, and a fake mediaeval prie-dieu.) The salon, on the contrary, where what was evidently a rather special goûter awaited, exhibited an Arts Décoratifs elegance more to the taste of Dolores: there were even black satin cushions like those at Richmond, but pen-painted with roses (again the frantic work of Angèle). Here Madame Dubois and Mr. Joyce once more conversed in French while Martha silently consumed petitsfours. Even in her native tongue any social effort was a pain in the neck to her; certainly not hers the easy social gift of masking by nod or smile a complete absence of vocabulary. Also despite two pots of mirabelle-jam she still felt for once a trifle exhausted. Instinctively absorbing into her system as much more sugar as possible, Martha simply, and silently and rapidly, ate.

  Fortunately no social effort was required of her. At the studio where she was to be enrolled, though he took her along in tow, Mr. Joyce but left Martha to wait in an ante-chamber while he himself nipped familiarly through a further door. Martha was too much below par to be affronted, or even inquisitive, and for the next hour in fact went to sleep in a large dilapidated leather chair. Whatever Mr. Joyce had been saying about her within, whatever the effect produced by the half-dozen of her drawings he carried with him, was summed up to Martha by a mere encouraging (also awakening) pat on the head from a large, big-knuckled, freckled hand …

  She blinked up at it suspiciously. It wasn’t Mr. Joyce’s hand. Since she disliked being patted in any case, Martha nearly bit it.

  “Je t’ai dit, c’est une petite sauvage,” said Mr. Joyce, over her head. “Tout de même, on verra …”

  4

  “Who was that?” demanded Martha suspiciously, as they emerged into the street again.

  “You’d better call him Maître,” said Mr. Joyce, “because he is going to be your master.”

  “Oh,” said Martha.

  “And I may tell you you are a very fortunate young person,” added Mr. Joyce, “to be accepted into his studio.”

  “Oh,” said Martha again. “When do I start?”

  “To-morrow,” said Mr. Joyce.

  She ruminated so long, he felt a brief misgiving. Undeniably she was getting pretty drastic treatment: though it was a measure of his belief in her, also experience had taught him that the only way to handle Martha was strictly with the gloves off, nonetheless, for a moment, Mr. Joyce’s heart misgave him. From the patron to the paternal, how short, if retrograde, a step! For a moment, seeing Martha stand so stricken, and even (for Martha) pale, he contemplated taking her straight back with him—restoring her to the bosom of the Gibsons, leaving her to pursue her way uncuffed by any large, big-knuckled, freckled hand …

  “Don’t you want to go to the studio?” asked Mr. Joyce.

  “Yes, but I don’t know how to get there,” said Martha.

  Mr. Joyce, unaware that he had been holding his breath, expelled it in a sigh of relief.

  “Angèle will take you, on her way to school.”

  “Shan’t I look silly?” asked Martha dubiously.

  “Very,” agreed Mr. Joyce, “until you learn which ’bus to take …”

  Upon which he returned Martha to the rue de Vaugirard, and himself, having many connections in Paris, enjoyed a very pleasant evening before returning to London next day.

  “Sink or swim!” thought Mr. Joyce. “Sink or swim!” exclaimed Mr. Joyce aloud, to a startled pretty companion in the small hours of the morning. “But who would wish to do either,” enquired the pretty companion reasonably, “when all that is necessary is to remain within one’s depth?—Chéri, why not take me to the Lido?”

  The suggestion fell on ears deaf as a wise adder’s; but unlike Harry Gibson, Mr. Joyce had had a jolly.

  Chapter Three

  Martha swam.

  She was so little homesick, an apartment in the rue de Vaugirard was just as acceptable to her as a Richmond flat; and within a matter of days became almost as familiar. There was her own room, and the salon, and the dining-room and bathroom—this last the least satisfactory: flakes of enamel from its antique tub adhered to Martha’s behind, also the water was never quite hot—and somewhere in the hinterland, so to speak, a kitchen, and the rooms of Madame and Angèle. The general pattern was one lateral (the corridor), crossed by two short arms. Martha settled down in it very comfortably.

  Contrary to Mr. Joyce’s prophecy, she learnt to speak practically no French at all. She learnt to understand it; but discovering, for example, that when she said “No,” people understood just as well as if she’d said “Non,” left it at that. It wasn’t as though she had anything she particularly wanted to say. The power of expressing thoughts, or emotions, was unnecessary to her; and not to be able to answer questions a positive advantage.

  On the other hand, both Madame Dubois and Angèle learnt a good deal of English.

  Angèle was very kind. She had a kind face. She also, by some peculiar freak of genes, precisely embodied the Gallic caricature of an Englishwoman. Five-foot-eight and bony, she moved without grace: a superfluity of combs and pins weighed down rather than secured hair less blonde than mousy; her long large teeth, when she smiled, suggested an amiable horse. Martha learnt which ’bus to take to the studio also within a matter of days.

  The basic reasons, however, for her easy swimming lay deeper. They were two. The first was that in Paris painting was accepted as a normal and serious occupation. In the circumstances Martha must have grasped this by a species of osmosis, have simply breathed the knowledge in with the Paris air; she recognized it nevertheless, as do all practitioners of the arts who have the luck to lodge, however briefly, on the banks of the Seine. It was what Mr. Joyce had groped to express: an ethos beside which, upon which, all the expertise of dealers is but parasitic. In Paris, an artist swims not against, but with, the stream.

  The second reason was that she immediately re-est
ablished a routine. There was the morning period at the studio, then back to the rue de Vaugirard for lunch, then the afternoon period; between goûter and dinner a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens with Angèle served the double purpose of giving Martha fresh air and improving Angèle’s English; after dinner, while the latter corrected exercises and Madame sewed, a programme on the T.S.F. theoretically improved Martha’s French. By ten she was in bed, and slept like a log for the next nine hours, to be ready to start all over again next day.

  Even at the studio she had things pretty much her own way. Mr. Joyce’s threat notwithstanding, she wasn’t consigned to the Antique. She was put straight into Life—where she continued, doggedly, to draw whatever heating-pipes or lighting-apparatus the background afforded; until one morning a large, big-knuckled, freckled hand took her by the scruff and hauled her from her position in front of the model to a position in front of the studio stove. Only the general sense of le maître’s anathema reached her, not its classic periods; but it was a commonplace in the studio that le maître never bothered to swear save at a definite talent, and Martha correctly accepted a permission to draw what she liked.—As a quid pro quo, and not without a certain rough humour, she casually executed, the following week, a meticulous one-eighth life-size of the model complete to toe- and fingernails …

  “One trusts Mademoiselle has enjoyed the exercise?” enquired le maître sardonically.

  “No,” said Martha. “She was like an English model.”