The proprietor of the café saw them coming when they were still a long way off; the lamps at that time were still alight (it was later that the bullets broke the bulbs and dropped darkness over all that quarter of Paris), and the group showed up plainly in the wide barren boulevard. Since sunset only one customer had entered the café, and very soon after sunset firing could be heard from the direction of Combat; the Metro station had closed hours ago. And yet something obstinate and undefeatable in the proprietor’s character prevented him from putting up the shutters; it might have been avarice; he could not himself have told what it was as he pressed his broad yellow forehead against the glass and stared this way and that, up the boulevard and down the boulevard.
But when he saw the group and their air of hurry he began immediately to close the café. First he went and warned his only customer who was practising billiard shots, walking round and round the table, frowning and stroking a thin moustache between shots, a little green in the face under the low diffused lights.
‘The Reds are coming,’ the proprietor said, ‘you’d better be off. I’m putting up the shutters.’
‘Don’t interrupt. They won’t harm me,’ the customer said. ‘This is a tricky shot. Red’s in baulk. Off the cushion. Screw on spot.’ He shot his ball straight into a pocket.
‘I knew you couldn’t do anything with that,’ the proprietor said, nodding his bald head. ‘You might just as well go home. Give me a hand with the shutters first. I’ve sent my wife away.’ The customer turned on him maliciously, rattling the cue between his fingers. ‘It was your talking that spoilt the shot. You’ve cause to be frightened, I dare say. But I’m a poor man. I’m safe. I’m not going to stir.’ He went across to his coat and took out a dry cigar. ‘Bring me a bock.’ He walked round the table on his toes and the balls clicked and the proprietor padded back to the bar, elderly and irritated. He did not fetch the beer but began to close the shutters; every move he made was slow and clumsy. Long before he had finished the group of Communists was outside.
He stopped what he was doing and watched them with furtive dislike. He was afraid that the rattle of the shutters would attract their attention. If I am very quiet and still, he thought, they may go on, and he remembered with malicious pleasure the police barricade across the Place de la République. That will finish them. In the meanwhile I must be very quiet, very still, and he felt a kind of warm satisfaction at the idea that worldly wisdom dictated the very attitude most suited to his nature. So he stared through the edge of a shutter, yellow, plump, cautious, hearing the billiard balls crackle in the other room, seeing the young man come limping up the pavement on the girl’s arm, watching them stand and stare with dubious faces up the boulevard towards Combat.
But when they came into the café he was already behind the bar, smiling and bowing and missing nothing, noticing how they had divided forces, how six of them had begun to run back the way they had come.
The young man sat down in a dark corner above the cellar stairs and the others stood round the door waiting for something to happen. It gave the proprietor an odd feeling that they should stand there in his café not asking for a drink, knowing what to expect, when he, the owner, knew nothing, understood nothing. At last the girl said ‘Cognac’, leaving the others and coming to the bar, but when he poured it out for her, very careful to give a fair and not a generous measure, she simply took it to the man sitting in the dark and held it to his mouth.
‘Three francs,’ the proprietor said. She took the glass and sipped a little and turned it so that the man’s lips might touch the same spot. Then she knelt down and rested her forehead against the man’s forehead and so they stayed.
‘Three francs,’ the proprietor said, but he could not make his voice bold. The man was no longer visible in his corner, only the girl’s back, thin and shabby in a black cotton frock, as she knelt, leaning forward to find the man’s face. The proprietor was daunted by the four men at the door, by the knowledge that they were Reds who had no respect for private property, who would drink his wine and go away without paying, who would rape his women (but there was only his wife, and she was not there), who would rob his bank, who would murder him as soon as look at him. So with fear in his heart he gave up the three francs as lost rather than attract any more attention.
Then the worst that he contemplated happened.
One of the men at the door came up to the bar and told him to pour out four glasses of cognac. ‘Yes, yes,’ the proprietor said, fumbling with the cork, praying secretly to the Virgin to send an angel, to send the police, to send the Gardes Mobiles, now, immediately, before the cork came out, ‘that will be twelve francs.’
‘Oh, no,’ the man said, ‘we are all comrades here. Share and share alike. Listen,’ he said, with earnest mockery, leaning across the bar, ‘all we have is yours just as much as it’s ours, comrade,’ and stepping back a pace he presented himself to the proprietor, so that he might take his choice of stringy tie, of threadbare trousers, of starved features. ‘And it follows from that, comrade, that all you have is ours. So four cognacs. Share and share alike.’
‘Of course,’ the proprietor said, ‘I was only joking.’ Then he stood with bottle poised, and the four glasses tingled upon the counter. ‘A machine-gun,’ he said, ‘up by Combat,’ and smiled to see how for the moment the men forgot their brandy, as they fidgeted near the door. Very soon now, he thought, and I shall be quit of them.
‘A machine-gun,’ the Red said incredulously, ‘they’re using machine-guns?’
‘Well,’ the proprietor said, encouraged by this sign that the Gardes Mobiles were not very far away, ‘you can’t pretend that you aren’t armed yourselves.’ He leant across the bar in a way that was almost paternal. ‘After all, you know, your ideas – they wouldn’t do in France. Free love.’
‘Who’s talking of free love?’ the Red said.
The proprietor shrugged and smiled and nodded at the corner. The girl knelt with her head on the man’s shoulder, her back to the room. They were quite silent and the glass of brandy stood on the floor beside them. The girl’s beret was pushed back on her head and one stocking was laddered and darned from knee to ankle.
‘What, those two? They aren’t lovers.’
‘I,’ the proprietor said, ‘with my bourgeois notions would have thought . . .’
‘He’s her brother,’ the Red said.
The men came clustering round the bar and laughed at him. but softly as if a sleeper or a sick person were in the house. All the time they were listening for something. Between their shoulders the proprietor could look out across the boulevard; he could see the corner of the Faubourg du Temple.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘For friends,’ the Red said. He made a gesture with open palm as if to say: You see, we share and share alike. We have no secrets.
Something moved at the corner of the Faubourg du Temple.
‘Four more cognacs,’ the Red said.
‘What about those two?’ the proprietor asked.
‘Leave them alone. They’ll look after themselves. They’re tired.’
How tired they were. No walk up the boulevard from Ménilmontant could explain the tiredness. They seemed to have come farther and fared a great deal worse than their companions. They were more starved; they were infinitely more hopeless, sitting in their dark corner away from the friendly gossip, the amicable voices which now confused the proprietor’s brain, until for a moment he believed himself to be a host entertaining friends.
He laughed and made a broad joke directed at the two of them, but they made no sign of understanding. Perhaps they were to be pitied cut off from the camaraderie round the counter; perhaps they were to be envied for their deeper comradeship. The proprietor thought for no reason at all of the bare grey trees of the Tuileries like a series of exclamation marks drawn against the winter sky. Puzzled, disintegrated, with all his bearings lost, he stared out through the door towards the Faubourg.
It w
as as if they had not seen each other for a long while, and would soon again be saying good-bye. Hardly aware of what he was doing he filled four glasses with brandy. They stretched out worn blunted fingers for them.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something better than this’; then paused, conscious of what was happening across the boulevard. The lamplights splashed down on blue steel helmets; the Gardes Mobiles were lining out across the entrance to the Faubourg, and a machine-gun pointed directly at the café windows.
So, the proprietor thought, my prayers are answered. Now I must do my part, not look, not warn them, save myself. Have they covered the side door?
‘I will get the other bottle. Real Napoleon brandy. Share and share alike.’ He felt a curious lack of triumph as he opened the trap of the bar and came out. He tried not to walk quickly back towards the billiard room. Nothing that he did must warn these men; he tried to spur himself with the thought that every slow casual step he took was a blow for France, for his café, for his savings. He had to step over the girl’s feet to pass her; she was asleep. He noted the sharp shoulder blades thrusting through the cotton, and raised his eyes and met her brother’s, filled with pain and despair.
He stopped. He found he could not pass without a word. It was as if he needed to explain something, as if he belonged to the wrong party. With false bonhomie he waved the corkscrew he carried in the other’s face. ‘Another cognac, eh?’
‘It’s no good talking to them,’ the Red said, ‘they’re German. They don’t understand a word.’
‘German?’
‘That’s what’s wrong with his leg. A concentration camp.’
The proprietor told himself that he must be quick, that he must put a door between him and them, that the end was very close, but he was bewildered by the hopelessness in the man’s gaze. ‘What’s he doing here?’ Nobody answered him. It was as if his question were too foolish to need a reply. With his head sunk upon his breast the proprietor went past, and the girl slept on. He was like a stranger leaving a room where all the rest are friends. A German. They don’t understand a word; and up, up through the heavy darkness of his mind, through the avarice and the dubious triumph, a few German words remembered from the very old days climbed like spies into the light: a line from the Lorelei learnt at school, Kamerad with its wartime suggestion of fear and surrender, and oddly from nowhere the phrase mein Bruder. He opened the door of the billiard room and closed it behind him and softly turned the key.
‘Spot in baulk,’ the customer explained and leant across the great green table, but while he took aim, wrinkling his narrow peevish eyes, the firing started. It came in two bursts with a rip of glass between. The girl cried out something, but it was not one of the words he knew. Then feet ran across the floor, the trap of the bar slammed. The proprietor sat back against the table and listened for any further sound; but silence came in under the door and silence through the keyhole.
‘The cloth. My God, the cloth,’ the customer said, and the proprietor looked down at his own hand which was working the corkscrew into the table.
‘Will this absurdity never end?’ the customer said. ‘I shall go home.’
‘Wait,’ the proprietor said, ‘wait.’ He was listening to voices and footsteps in the other room. They were voices he did not recognize. Then a car drove up and presently drove away again. Somebody rattled the handle of the door.
‘Who is it?’ the proprietor called.
‘Who are you? Open that door.’
‘Ah,’ the customer said with relief, ‘the police. Where was I now? Spot in baulk.’ He began to chalk his cue. The proprietor opened the door. Yes, the Gardes Mobiles had arrived; he was safe again, though his windows were smashed. The Reds had vanished as if they had never been. He looked at the raised trap, at the smashed electric bulbs, at the broken bottle which dripped behind the bar. The café was full of men, and he remembered with odd relief that he had not had time to lock the side door.
‘Are you the owner?’ the officer asked. ‘A bock for each of these men and a cognac for myself. Be quick about it.’
The proprietor calculated, ‘Nine francs fifty,’ and watched closely with bent head the coins rattle upon the counter.
‘You see,’ the officer said with significance, ‘we pay.’ He nodded towards the side door. ‘Those others: did they pay?’
No, the proprietor admitted, they had not paid, but as he counted the coins and slipped them into the till, he caught himself silently repeating the officer’s order – ‘A bock for each of these men.’ Those others, he thought, one’s got to say that for them, they weren’t mean about the drink. It was four cognacs with them. But, of course, they did not pay. ‘And my windows,’ he complained aloud with sudden asperity, ‘what about my windows?’
‘Never you mind,’ the officer said, ‘the government will pay. You have only to send in your bill. Hurry up now with my cognac. I have no time for gossip.’
‘You can see for yourself,’ the proprietor said, ‘how the bottles have been broken. Who will pay for that?’
‘Everything will be paid for,’ the officer said.
‘And now I must go to the cellar to fetch more.’
He was angry at the reiteration of the word pay. They enter my café, he thought, they smash my windows, they order me about and think that all is well if they pay, pay, pay. It occurred to him that these men were intruders.
‘Step to it,’ the officer said, and turned and rebuked one of the men who had leant his rifle against the bar.
At the top of the cellar stairs the proprietor stopped. They were in darkness, but by the light from the bar he could just make out a body half-way down. He began to tremble violently, and it was some seconds before he could strike a match. The young German lay head downwards, and the blood from his head had dropped on to the step below. His eyes were open and stared back at the proprietor with the old despairing expression of life. The proprietor would not believe that he was dead. ‘Kamerad,’ he said, bending down, while the match singed his fingers and went out, trying to recall some phrase in German, but he could only remember, as he bent lower still, ‘mein Bruder’. Then suddenly he turned and ran up the steps, waved the match-box in the officer’s face, and called out in a low hysterical voice to him and his men and to the customer stooping under the low green shade, ‘Salauds! Salauds!’
‘What was that? What was that?’ the officer exclaimed. ‘Did you say that he was your brother? It’s impossible,’ and he frowned incredulously at the proprietor and rattled the coins in his pocket.
1936
JUBILEE
MR CHALFONT ironed his trousers and his tie. Then he folded up his ironing-board and put it away. He was tall and he had preserved his figure; he looked distinguished even in his pants in the small furnished bed-sitting room he kept off Shepherd’s Market. He was fifty, but he didn’t look more than forty-five; he was stony broke, but he remained unquestionably Mayfair.
He examined his collar with anxiety; he hadn’t been out of doors for more than a week, except to the public-house at the corner to eat his morning and evening ham roll, and then he always wore an overcoat and a soiled collar. He decided that it wouldn’t damage the effect if he wore it once more; he didn’t believe in economizing too rigidly over his laundry, you had to spend money in order to earn money, but there was no point in being extravagant. And somehow he didn’t believe in his luck this cocktail time; he was going out for the good of his morale, because after a week away from the restaurants it would have been so easy to let everything slide, to confine himself to his room and his twice daily visit to the public-house.
The Jubilee decorations were still out in the cold windy May. Soiled by showers and soot the streamers blew up across Piccadilly, draughty with desolation. They were the reminder of a good time Mr Chalfont hadn’t shared; he hadn’t blown whistles or thrown paper ribbons; he certainly hadn’t danced to any harmoniums. His neat figure was like a symbol of Good Taste as he waited with folded umbrel
la for the traffic lights to go green; he had learned to hold his hand so that one frayed patch on his sleeve didn’t show, and the rather exclusive club tie, freshly ironed, might have been bought that morning. It wasn’t lack of patriotism or loyalty which had kept Mr Chalfont indoors all through Jubilee week. Nobody drank the toast of the King more sincerely than Mr Chalfont so long as someone else was standing the drink, but an instinct deeper than good form had warned him not to be about. Too many people whom he had once known (so he explained it) were coming up from the country; they might want to look him up, and a fellow just couldn’t ask them back to a room like this. That explained his discretion; it didn’t explain his sense of oppression while he waited for the Jubilee to be over.
Now he was back at the old game.
He called it that himself, smoothing his neat grey military moustache. The old game. Somebody going rapidly round the corner into Berkeley Street nudged him playfully and said, ‘Hullo, you old devil,’ and was gone again, leaving the memory of many playful nudges in the old days, of Merdy and the Boob. For he couldn’t disguise the fact that he was after the ladies. He didn’t want to disguise it. It made his whole profession appear even to himself rather gallant and carefree. It disguised the fact that the ladies were not so young as they might be and that it was the ladies (God bless them!) who paid. It disguised the fact that Merdy and the Boob had long ago vanished from his knowledge. The list of his acquaintances included a great many women but hardly a single man; no one was more qualified by a long grimy experience to tell smoking-room stories, but the smoking-room in which Mr Chalfont was welcome did not nowadays exist.
Mr Chalfont crossed the road. It wasn’t an easy life, it exhausted him nervously and physically, he needed a great many sherries to keep going. The first sherry he had always to pay for himself; that was the thirty pounds he marked as expenses on his income-tax return. He dived through the entrance, not looking either way, for it would never do for the porter to think that he was soliciting any of the women who moved heavily like seals through the dim aquarium light of the lounge. But his usual seat was occupied.
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