Psyche

by Phyllis Young

  Kathie, looking up from a book, considered it fortunate she should be the sole witness to a state of nervous indecision entirely at variance with Bel’s normal, and necessarily tough realism. During the four years she had been at Bel’s place she had never seen her other than decisive and sure of herself.

  She laid aside her book. “Why are you so concerned about this particular girl, Bel?”

  “I don’t know,” Bel said evasively. “There was something about her that got me, that’s all.”

  “She’s probably gone by now.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think she has. The kid’s got no place to go, that’s my guess.”

  Kathie did not like the trend of this conversation. She, more than any of the other girls, stood to lose too much if Bel did anything foolish. “She’ll be all right,” she said evenly. “You said yourself that she was well dressed. You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

  Bel scarcely seemed to hear her. “It can be kind of a turning point in a girl’s life—having no place to go.”

  Kathie, by virtue of the extraordinary combination of professions that she practised, exercised a freedom of speech that no one else in Bel’s house would have dared to imitate. “Pull yourself together, Bel,” she said quietly. “You’re being sentimental, and you can’t afford to be.”

  She’s right, Bel thought, I’m being a damned fool. And just because that kid reminds me of somebody, I’m going to be an even bigger damned fool.

  She looked all of her forty-seven years as she swung round to face the girl behind her. “I’m going to take her in,” she said, and her tone was warning that she would brook no argument. “Gîo on out to the park, and bring her back with you.”

  Kathie rose to her feet. “Are you sure you’ll be doing her a favour?”

  Bel’s expression was grim. “I said I was taking her in, not taking her on. There’ll be no mistake about that.”

  Shrugging, Kathie gave up. “All right. I’ll get her.”

  “Go quickly, will you? That cop isn’t going to leave her be if she stays there much longer. He’ll have the wrong idea about her.”

  Kathie’s smile was as cynical as her parting thrust. “Don’t blame him. At this rate he won’t be much ahead of events.”

  When Kathie said she would do a thing, she did it. She had no sympathy with the errand on which she had been dispatched, but she went swiftly, even though it meant adding an additional hazard to the precarious tight-rope of her own Jekyll and Hyde existence.

  She saw Psyche as soon as she entered the park, a motionless, fair-haired statuette in the pale periphery of light cast by a street lamp outside the iron fencing. A figure which, in spite of its immobility, conveyed no feeling of relaxation.

  “Damn,” she murmured under her breath. But when she approached Psyche, and spoke to her, there was no hostility in her manner.

  “Bel sent me. If you have nowhere to go to-night, you can come back to her place with me.”

  Looking up, Psyche saw a plain, dark girl in a plain, dark dress; a thin girl of twenty-eight or nine, with a straight fall of dark hair, and a white triangular face saved from mediocrity by enormous eyes and a bitterly beautiful mouth.

  “I don’t know anyone called Bel,” she said tonelessly.

  Kathie was unmoved by beauty, and she was not old enough herself for youth to have any appeal for her, but intellect, even in its feeblest manifestations, never failed to command her interest. Recognizing in Psyche the possibility of real intelligence, she curbed a rising impatience, and said quietly, “Bel sat beside you, and talked to you, here, earlier this evening.”

  The woman in red who had given her a cigarette. Now she was offering her a refuge. It was too completely unexpected, this lifeline held out to her without any reason that she could fathom. “She—Bel, is sure she wants me?”

  “She is,” Kathie replied briefly.

  “I would be foolish not to go, wouldn’t I?”

  Kathie’s expression was enigmatic. “That’s for you to judge.”

  “I’ll come,” Psyche said, but she did not move.

  “Do you expect me to carry you, or are you going to get up and walk?” Kathie asked ironically. Then, her voice sharpening, she said, “Come on. Get up now, will you. The law is bearing down on us, and I, for one, have no desire to stay and converse with it.”

  This time Psyche really saw the policeman approaching, and, suddenly free of the lethargy that had bound her, grasped some of the factual implications of her situation. Rational as she had not been since discovering that she had lost her money, she realized that a prison cell on a vagrancy charge would have been her fate rather than any gradual, anonymous annihilation.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been a bit confused. Let’s go.”

  2

  ALTHOUGH Psyche was not entirely ignorant, she was still in many ways an innocent, and it was two or three days before she fully understood the purpose and nature of bel’s establishment.

  One of the chief reasons for Bel’s success was her refusal to allow anyone at any time to place any particular emphasis on the one factor in her business without which it would have ceased to exist. A very shrewd woman, she took a leaf from the book of the preceding century, and operated on the principle that a good time was an intangible, some of whose many facets must, of necessity, reflect a social and communal base. Working carefully over a long period of time, she had created a façade so apparently blameless that she had never at any time had any trouble with the police; and, within her four walls, an atmosphere so comfortably gay that many of the men who came there almost forgot their original reason for coming. With infinite patience, always taking the long view, she had built up a steady rather than a casual clientele, looking for more than a well-lined purse before she granted the freedom of her premises.

  She was well rewarded for her pains, and not only with money. Six evenings a week the big living-room, with its rose-shaded lamps and well-cushioned furniture, had the aura of a pleasantly informal club.

  The club, although fully licensed in certain respects, nevertheless had a few strictly enforced ground rules. The girls were allowed to accept presents, over and above their proper share in the membership fees, but never cash as such. Bel had two reasons for this, both of them good: large sums of money, if they were ever unfortunate enough to be visited by the police, would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain satisfactorily; secondly, she had the acumen to see that the kind of illusions she worked to achieve would not stand up for long before the harsh wind of a too obvious commercialism. That the presents that some of the girls, particularly May, managed to extract from their admirers, were extremely valuable, did not matter to her.

  The rules that governed behaviour were never expressed in so many words. They simply became obvious, and, supported by custom, were observed without protest.

  The club opened around eight o’clock, and closed ostensibly at two-thirty. Between eleven and twelve o’clock the serving of whiskey was discontinued, strong coffee being provided in its place; and food, too attractive to be ignored, was on hand at all times. Thus, steering clear of specific individual pressures, Bel avoided any awkwardness that drinking might have precipitated.

  Her greatest strategic triumph, however, was in her handling of the poker game that was in session every evening and all evening. A less clever woman might have been tempted to make this a personally lucrative side-line. Not Bel. The game was always absolutely on the level, and the players could sit in or drop out on their own terms.

  An evening at Bel’s was much like going to a private party, with the minor difference that one could, from the start, be honest with oneself about one’s intentions.

  During the daytime Bel’s place resembled nothing so much as a well-furnished girls’ boarding-house—an impression strengthened by the fact that all the girls left the house for a number of hours every day, their times of departure determined by the part-time, outside jobs without which Bel w
ould not accept them.

  As she explained to Psyche later, “I can’t have the responsibility of keeping them when they go off, and I wouldn’t have the heart to turn them out on the street. I tell them they got to have something to fall back on, and besides you can’t expect anybody to have any respect for a girl who lies around all day doing nothing.”

  Although she was entirely honest in this expression of her feelings, Bel might have added that her insistence on a secondary occupation for her girls was a not unimportant part of the front she showed to the world, a front so cleverly stage-managed it would have been almost impossible to improve upon it.

  Her establishment consisted of the second and third stories of two semi-detached houses that she had at first rented, and later, prospering, bought outright. The two houses, in effect one building, were situated on a side street running south from the square encircling the park and art gallery, but close enough to the corner for an oblique view of the park to be possible from all the windows that faced the street. It was a location calculated to a nicety. She was sufficiently near to the faded grandeur surrounding the park to make the presence of cars outside her place unremarkable, yet not so near that the people inhabiting this section would be likely to evince any interest in her. Further south, the district, deteriorating rapidly, housed a class that fully appreciated the reciprocal value of leaving other people alone.

  From outside, the size of the quarters she occupied could not be guessed at, for, although the upper two stories had been converted into one unit, the ground floor with its two separate entrances had been left more or less untouched. On the south, all access to the upper floors had been cut off, and she rented the independent apartment thus formed to a Lithuanian family who, not at all fortuitously, were unable to converse intelligibly with anyone other than fellow Lithuanians. A large and boisterous family, apparently perfectly happy in their linguistic isolation, they unwittingly created—particularly of a summer’s evening when gathered en masse around their front doorstep—the impression that they must, of necessity, occupy much more of the house than was actually the case. Later on. Psyche, becoming fond of the fat and smiling baby, was often a part of this group, her blonde head a startling contrast to the dark ones around her.

  Bel’s disposition of the ground floor on the north side was somewhat different, but equally well-considered. Inside the front door one found an enclosed stairway blocked by a door that was always kept locked; this was the real entrance to Bel’s own domain. At the back of a narrow hall was another door. This led to Kathie’s quarters, for Kathie did not, at least for the record, ‘live in’. The three remaining ground-floor rooms were let to an old lady who was, conveniently, almost blind; an old lady whose name had been one to conjure with in the society of the early nineteen-hundreds. A severely straight figure, clad all in black, her patrician features waxen clear behind a fine black veil, she could be seen, morning and afternoon the year round, walking slowly up and down in front of the great house on the square that had once been hers. Seeing her thus, one saw again, if at all imaginative, the gracious leisure of the turn of the century; saw carriages with liveried footmen; saw plumed hats and trailing pastel-tinted skirts; saw, as she still saw, all the images of a once bright yesterday.

  Bel had used her head, rather than her heart, when she had given this tenant her small niche on the edge of the only world she would ever again see clearly. However, as was so often the case with Bel, her sympathy involved her as she had not anticipated in advance, and, as living costs rose, on one pretext or another she continued to reduce a rental already disproportionately low.

  When Kathie, who often audited her accounts for her, had questioned her about this, she had made no attempt to rationalize her generosity, simply saying tartly, “That old dame stays there as long as I have a bean to my name.”

  To Psyche, therefore, as she followed Kathie up the walk to Bel’s on the evening when she first came there, was unfolded a montage of impressions specifically designed to mislead people a great deal less innocent than she was.

  They were met by vocal greetings from the Lithuanian family, a dimly seen cluster in the dusk—greetings in broken English difficult to interpret, but unmistakably friendly, irrepressibly cheerful. And as this welcome subsided into carefree, private laughter, she saw on her right—a three-dimensional portrait framed in darkness—the old lady sitting by her open window, her white head resting against the sombre tapestry of a wing chair, her delicate blue-veined hands folded tranquilly in a black silken lap.

  The inside hall was dimly lit, but when Kathie unlocked the door to the stairway they entered at once into the rosy reflected light of a big room which, as Psyche stepped into it, seemed not unlike a rose-coloured heaven, the core of its warmth and brightness the plump woman in red who came forward to welcome her.

  “Come right on in, baby, and make yourself at home.”

  Her voice unsteady, Psyche said, “I don’t know why you have done this. I—I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it, baby. I once had it tough, myself. Here, Kathie, take the kid’s things up to that little room you used to have.” Then, turning and addressing a man standing behind her, she said, “This is her, Joe. The kid I was just telling you about.”

  Psyche saw a swarthy, heavy-set man in his fifties, with eyes, beneath thick dark eyebrows, as shrewd and friendly as Bel’s own. A large diamond winked on the little finger of the hand he extended to her, and, although there were many who would have deplored his presence in that place, his firm clasp and genial self-assurance added a note of permanence and stability to the scene that would have been lacking without him.

  “Joe’s a special friend of mine, baby,” Bel said. “If you stick around, you’ll be seeing a lot of him, so you better decide to like him.”

  For the first time in twenty-four hours. Psyche smiled. “I don’t have to decide.”

  There was triumph in Bel’s voice. “There you are, Joe! What did I say? I told you she was a nice kid, and I wasn’t bom yesterday.”

  The man stroked a chin which would always, even after he had just shaved, betray a blue shadow. “You’ve made a good friend, girlie. You’re lucky.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” Psyche said quietly. “I know it.”

  It was Joe’s turn to smile, a smile which showed even white teeth, gold-stopped in two places. “Okay, Bel. You were right. I guess you and the girlie here will work things out between you.”

  The light that had transiently come into Psyche’s face faded, and even the warm glow of the lamp failed to cover up her drained whiteness.

  Bel, watching her, said quickly, “You’re dead beat, aren’t you, baby? Look, I’m going to take you up to your room pronto, and one of the girls will bring you supper on a tray.”

  “I’m sorry. You see, I lost my purse, and I”

  But Bel would not let her go on. “You can tell me all about it in the morning, baby. Right now, you’re going to bed. My God, she’s got beautiful hair, hasn’t she, Joe? Come on, baby, it’s this way.”

  It was not one of the girls, but Bel, herself, who brought a tray up to the third floor room under the eaves which Psyche was to like better, in many ways, than any other room she ever had.

  “There you are,” Bel said, putting the tray down on a table beside the bed. “Just set it outside the door when you’re finished, and someone will chase it later on. Sleep as late as you want, and don’t worry about a thing. Just sleep tight, don’t let ‘em bite, and we’ll have a real good talk tomorrow.”

  Listening to the sound of small pumps descending the stairs, Psyche knew that the tap of high heels would always remind her of Bel as long as she lived.

  She looked around the little room, at the blue curtains, at the window-seat from which one could see out over the tops of the trees in the park, at the frilled dressing-table, at the soft grey carpet, at the reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy hanging against a clean grey wall—and knew that
, hungry as she was, she must cry before she could eat.

  When she woke in the morning, she realized that the house and her room both faced east, for direct sunlight poured in across the window-seat. It was this, as much as anything else, that oriented her immediately, that told her as soon as she opened her eyes that she was no longer at Nick’s. The intermingled sounds of traffic, voices, and all the machinery of a great city at that hour in high gear, were a secondary impression, and one that she was in a mood to like. Silence, at that moment, would have been disconcerting.

  Lying there, not quite ready to move physically into this strange new day, she found it almost impossible to believe that she had left the studio only the previous afternoon. Nick, the red-roofed barn, and the long, warm hours of the past summer seemed like an interlude already dimmed by the passing of much time. Curiously it was the shack that seemed close to her just then, closer and more real than it had been since the night on which she had fled from it. Briefly she knew a painful nostalgia for something that could never be hers again, for the uncomplicated existence—actually so far removed from what she really wanted— that she had known with the two big, simple people who had never been other than kind to her.

  When she was dressed, she went downstairs and retraced her steps along the corridor flanked by closed doors through which Bel had led her on the previous evening. Entering the living-room, she found it deserted, but from an open doorway at the far end she heard a radio playing and Bel’s slightly hoarse voice raised above it.

  She approached this door, and saw a large, streamlined red-and-white kitchen, divided by a counter into two parts, the nearer section furnished with chrome-fitted red tables and chairs. Bel was partial to red.

  Bel, in a dressing-gown, sat at one of these tables, an empty coffee cup in front of her, talking to a girl whose back was to the door.

  “Hello,” Psyche said uncertainly.

  Bel’s response, on seeing her, was just right. Casual, friendly, it was as if she had been used to having her around for a long time. “Hello, baby. Come on in and have something to eat. You sleep well?”