But he felt more disinclined for sleep than ever, and he could not bear the thought of getting into bed again. He turned the shade down so that the light should not disturb Lydia, and going to the table filled his pipe and lit it. He drew the heavy curtain that was over the window and sitting down looked out into the court. It was in darkness but for one lighted window, and this had a sinister look. He wondered whether someone lay ill in that room or, simply sleepless like himself, brooded over the perplexity of life. Or perhaps some man had brought a woman in, and their lust appeased, they lay contented in one another’s arms. Charley smoked. He felt dull and flat. He did not think of anything in particular. At last he went back to bed and fell asleep.
ix
CHARLEY WAS AWAKENED by the maid bringing in the morning coffee. For a moment he forgot the events of the previous night.
“Oh, I was sleeping so soundly,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“I’m sorry, but it’s half-past ten and I have an engagement at eleven-thirty.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my last day in Paris and it would be silly to waste it in sleep.”
The maid had brought the two breakfasts on one tray and Lydia told her to give it to Charley. She put on a dressing-gown and sat down at the end of his bed, leaning against the foot. She poured out a cup of coffee, cut a roll in two and buttered it for him.
“I’ve been watching you sleep,” she said. “It’s nice; you sleep like an animal or a child, so deep, so quiet, it rests one just to look at you.”
Then he remembered.
“I’m afraid you didn’t have a very good night.”
“Oh, yes, I did. I slept like a top. I was tired out, you know. That’s one of the things I’m most grateful to you for, I’ve had such wonderful nights. I dream terribly. But since I’ve been here I haven’t dreamt once; I’ve slept quite peacefully. And I who thought I should never sleep like that again.”
He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebore to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one was sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind. An uncomfortable thought crossed his mind. He could not quite make it explicit, but had he been able to, he would perhaps have asked himself:
“Who are we really? What do we know about ourselves? And that other life of ours, is that less real than this one?”
It was all very strange and complicated. It looked as though nothing were quite so simple as it seemed; it looked as though the people we thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn’t even know themselves. Charley had a sudden inkling that human beings were infinitely mysterious. The fact was that you knew nothing about anybody.
“What’s this engagement you’ve got?” he asked, more for the sake of saying something than because he wanted to know.
Lydia lit a cigarette before she answered.
“Marcel, the fat man who runs the place we were at last night, introduced me to two men there and I’ve made an appointment to meet them at the Palette this morning. We couldn’t talk in all that crowd.”
“Oh!”
He was too discreet to ask who they were.
“Marcel’s in touch with Cayenne and St. Laurent. He often gets news. That’s why I wanted to go there. They landed at St. Nazaire last week.”
“Who? The two men? Are they escaped convicts?”
“No. They’ve served their sentence. They got their passage paid by the Salvation Army. They knew Robert.” She hesitated a moment. “If you want to, you can come with me. They’ve got no money. They’d be grateful if you gave them a little.”
“All right. Yes, I’d like to come.”
“They seem very decent fellows. One of them doesn’t look more than thirty now. Marcel told me he was a cook and he was sent out for killing another man in the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked. I don’t know what the other had done. You’d better go and have your bath.” She went over to the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass. “Funny, I wonder why my eyelids are swollen. To look at me you’d think I’d been crying, and you know I haven’t, don’t you?”
“Perhaps it was that smoky atmosphere last night. By George! you could have cut it with a knife.”
“I’ll ring down for some ice. They’ll be all right after we’ve been out in the air for five minutes.”
The Palette was empty when they got there. Late breakfasters had had their coffee and gone, and it was too early for anyone to have come in for an apéritif before luncheon. They sat in a corner, near the window, so that they could look out into the street. They waited for several minutes.
“There they are,” said Lydia.
Charley looked out and saw two men walking past. They glanced in, hesitated a moment and strolled on, then came back; Lydia gave them a smile, but they took no notice of her; they stood still, looking up and down the street, and then doubtfully at the café. It looked as though they couldn’t make up their minds to enter. Their manner was timid and furtive. They said a few words to one another and the younger of the two gave a hasty anxious glance behind him. The other seemed on a sudden to force himself to a decision and walked towards the door. His friend followed quickly. Lydia gave them a wave and a smile when they came in. They still took no notice. They looked round stealthily, as though to assure themselves that they were safe, and then, the first with averted eyes, the other fixing the ground, came up. Lydia shook hands with them and introduced Charley. They evidently had expected her to be alone and his presence disconcerted them. They gave him a look of suspicion. Lydia explained that he was an Englishman, a friend who was spending a few days in Paris. Charley, a smile on his lips which he sought to make cordial, stretched out his hand; they took it, one after the other, and gave it a limp pressure. They seemed to have nothing to say. Lydia bade them sit down and asked them what they would have.
“A cup of coffee.”
“You’ll have something to eat?”
The elder one gave the other a faint smile.
“A cake, if there is one. The boy has a sweet tooth, and over there, from where we come, there wasn’t much in that line.”
The man who spoke was a little under the middle height. He might have been forty. The other was two or three inches taller and perhaps ten years younger. Both were very thin. They both wore collars and ties and thick suits, one of a gray-and-white check and the other dark green, but the suits were ill-cut and sat loosely on them. They did not look at ease in them. The elder one, sturdy though short, had a well-knit figure; his sallow, colourless face was much lined. He had an air of determination. The other’s face was as sallow and colourless, but his skin, drawn tightly over the bones, was smooth and unlined; he looked very ill. There was another trait they shared; the eyes of both seemed preternaturally large, and when they turned them on you they did not appear to look at you, but beyond, with a demented stare, as though they were gazing at something that filled them with horror. It was very painful. At first they were shy, and since Charley was shy too, though he tried to show his friendliness by offering them cigarettes, while Lydia, seeming to find no need for words, contented herself with looking at them, they sat in silence. But she looked at them with such tender concern that the silence was not embarrassing. The waiter brought them coffee and a dish of cakes. The elder man toyed with one of them, but the other ate greedily, and as he ate he gave his friend now and then little touching looks of surprised delight.
“The first thing we did when we got out by ourselves in Paris was to go to a confectioner’s, and the boy ate six chocolate éclairs one after the other. But he paid for it.”
“Yes,” said the other seriously. “When we got out into the street I was sick. You see, my stomach wasn’t used to it. But it was worth it.”
“Did yo
u eat very badly over there?”
The elder man shrugged his shoulders.
“Beef three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. One doesn’t notice it after a time. And then, if you behave yourself you get cheese and a little wine. And it’s better to behave yourself. Of course it’s worse when you’ve done your sentence and you’re freed. When you’re in prison you get board and lodging, but when you’re free you have to shift for yourself.”
“My friend doesn’t know,” said Lydia. “Explain to him. They don’t have the same system in England.”
“It’s like this. You’re sentenced to a term of imprisonment, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and when you’ve done it you’re a libéré. You have to stay in the colony the same number of years that you were sentenced to. It’s hard to get work. The libérés have a bad name and people won’t employ them. It’s true that you can get a plot of land and cultivate it, but it’s not everyone who can do that. After being in prison for years, taking orders from the warders and half the time doing nothing, you’ve lost your initiative; and then there’s malaria and hook-worm; you’ve lost your energy. Most of them get work only when a ship comes in to harbour and they can earn a little by unloading the cargo. There’s nothing much for the libéré but to sleep in the market, drink rafia when he gets the chance, and starve. I was lucky. You see, I’m an electrician by trade, and a good one; I know my job as well as anyone, so they needed me. I didn’t do so badly.”
“How long was your sentence?” asked Lydia.
“Only eight years.”
“And what did you do?”
He slightly shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a deprecating smile.
“Folly of youth. One’s young, one gets into bad company, one drinks too much and then one day something happens and one has to pay for it all one’s life. I was twenty-four when I went out and I’m forty now. I’ve spent my best years in that hell.”
“He could have got away before,” said the other, “but he wouldn’t.”
“You mean you could have escaped?” said Lydia.
Charley gave her a quick, searching glance but her face told him nothing.
“Escape? No, that’s a mug’s game. One can always escape, but there are few who get away. Where can you go? Into the bush? Fever, wild animals, starvation, and the natives who’ll take you for the sake of the reward. A good many try it. You see, they get so fed up with the monotony, the food, the orders, the sight of all the rest of the prisoners, they think anything’s better, but they can’t stick it out; if they don’t die of illness or starvation, they’re captured or give themselves up; and then it’s two years’ solitary confinement, or more, and you have to be a hefty chap if that doesn’t break you. It was easier in the old days when the Dutch were building their railway, you could get across the river and they’d put you to work on it, but now they’ve finished the railway and they don’t want labour any more. They catch you and send you back. But even that had its risks. There was a customs official who used to promise to take you over the river for a certain sum, he had a regular tariff, you’d arrange to meet him at a place in the jungle at night, and when you kept the appointment he just shot you dead and emptied your pockets. They say he did away with more than thirty fellows before he was caught. Some of them get away by sea. Half a dozen club together and get a libéré to buy a rickety boat for them. It’s a hard journey, without a compass or anything, and one never knows when a storm will spring up; it’s more by luck than good management if they get anywhere. And where can they go? They won’t have them in Venezuela any longer and if they land there they’re just put in prison and sent back. If they land in Trinidad the authorities keep them for a week, stock them up with provisions, even give them a boat if theirs isn’t seaworthy, and then send them off, out into the sea with no place to go to. No, it’s silly to try to escape.”
“But men do,” said Lydia. “There was that doctor, what was his name? They say he’s practising somewhere in South America and doing well.”
“Yes, if you’ve got money you can get away sometimes, not if you’re on the islands, but if you’re at Cayenne or St. Laurent. You can get the skipper of a Brazilian schooner to pick you up at sea, and if he’s honest he’ll land you somewhere down the coast and you’re pretty safe. If he isn’t, he takes your money and chucks you overboard. But he’ll want twelve thousand francs now, and that means double because the libéré who gets the money in for you takes half as his commission. And then you can’t land in Brazil without a penny in your pocket. You’ve got to have at least thirty thousand francs, and who’s got that?”
Lydia asked a question and once more Charley gave her an inquiring look.
“But how can you be sure that the libéré will hand over the money that’s sent him?” she said.
“You can’t. Sometimes he doesn’t, but then he ends with a knife in his back, and he knows very well the authorities aren’t going to bother very much if a damned libéré is found dead one morning.”
“Your friend said just now you could have got away sooner, but didn’t. What did he mean by that?”
The little man gave his shoulders a deprecating shrug.
“I made myself useful. The commandant was a decent chap and he knew I was a good worker and honest. They soon found out they could leave me in a house by myself when they wanted a job done and I wouldn’t touch a thing. He got me permission to go back to France when I still had two more years to go of my time as a libéré.” He gave his friend a touching smile. “But I didn’t like to leave that young scamp. I knew that without me to look after him he’d get into trouble.”
“It’s true,” said the other. “I owe everything to him.”
“He was only a kid when he came out. He had the next bed to mine. He put up a pretty good show in the daytime, but at night he’d cry for his mother. I felt sorry for him. I don’t know how it happened, I got an affection for him; he was lost among all those men, poor little chap, and I had to look after him. Some of them were inclined to be nasty to him, one Algerian was always bothering, but I settled his hash and after that they left the boy in peace.”
“How did you do that?”
The little man gave a grin so cheerful and roguish that it made him look on a sudden ten years younger.
“Well, you know, in that life a man can only make himself respected if he knows how to use his knife. I ripped him up the belly.”
Charley gave a gasp. The man made the statement so naturally that one could hardly believe one had heard right.
“You see, one’s shut up in the dormitory from nine till five and the warders don’t come in. To tell you the truth, it would be as much as their lives were worth. If in the morning a man’s found with a hole in his gizzard, the authorities ask no questions so as they won’t be told no lies. So you see, I felt a kind of responsibility for the boy. I had to teach him everything. I’ve got a good brain and I soon discovered that out there if you want to make it easy for yourself the only thing is to do what you’re told and give no trouble. It’s not justice that reigns on the earth, it’s force, and they’ve got the force, the authorities; one of these days perhaps we shall have it, we the working-men, and then we shall get a bit of our own back on the bourgeois, but till then we’ve got to obey. That’s what I taught him, and I taught him my job too, and now he’s almost as good an electrician as I am.”
“The only thing now is to find work,” said the other. “Work together.”
“We’ve gone through so much together we can’t be parted now. You see, he’s all I’ve got. I’ve got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother’s dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It’s hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life.”
“And I, who have I got? It’s for life, us two.”
There was something very affecting in the friendship that bound those two hapless men together. It gave Charley a sense of exaltation that somewhat embarrassed him; he would have l
iked to tell them that he thought it brave and beautiful, but he knew he could never bring himself to say anything so unusual. But Lydia had none of his shyness.
Christmas Holiday Page 22
