The Age of Reason (26 page)

‘Well, you are a pair, you two,’ said Mathieu. ‘You’re always drinking stuff you don’t like.’

Boris beamed: he adored Mathieu to talk to him in that tone. Ivich bit her lips. ‘One can’t say anything to them,’ thought Mathieu, a little testily. ‘One of them always takes offence.’ There they were, confronting him, intent and grave: they had each of them conceived their individual picture of Mathieu, and they each insisted that he should conform to it. The trouble was that the two pictures conflicted.

They sat in silence.

Mathieu stretched his legs and smiled contentedly. The notes of a trumpet, shrill and defiant, reached his ears in gusts: it did not occur to him to listen for a tune: it was there, it made a noise, and gave him a rich, metallic thrill all over his skin. He realized, of course, that he was a wash-out: but, when all was said, in this dance-hall, at that table, among all those fellows who were also wash-outs, it did not seem to matter very much, and was not at all unpleasant. He looked round: the barman was still dreaming: on his right was a fellow wearing a monocle, alone, with a lined, drawn face: and another, farther off, also alone, and three drinks and a lady’s handbag on the table before him: his wife and his friend were no doubt dancing, and he looked in fact rather relieved: he yawned heavily behind his hand, and his little eyes blinked with satisfaction. Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes. Mathieu suddenly felt a kinship with all those creatures who would have done so much better to go home, but no longer had the power, and sat there smoking slender cigarettes, drinking steely-tasting compounds, smiling, as their ears oozed music, and dismally contemplating the wreckage of their destiny: he felt the discreet appeal of a humble and timorous happiness: ‘Fancy being one of that lot...’ Fear shook him, and he turned towards Ivich. Malicious and aloof as she was, in her lay his sole salvation. Ivich was peering rather dubiously at the transparent liquid remaining in her glass.

‘You must drink it at one go.’

‘Don’t do that,’ said Mathieu: ‘you’ll scorch your throat.’

‘Vodka ought to be drunk straight off.’

Ivich picked up her glass: ‘I would sooner drink it off, I shall have finished it quicker.’

‘No, don’t drink it, wait for the champagne.’

‘I must swallow the stuff,’ she said irritably. ‘I want to enjoy myself.’

She threw herself back in her chair, raised the glass to her lips, and tipped its entire contents into her mouth, rather as though she were filling a jug. She remained thus for a second, not daring to swallow, with a little pool of fire at the bottom of her gullet. Mathieu felt distressed.

‘Swallow!’ Boris said to her. ‘Imagine that it’s water: that’s the only thing to do.’

Ivich’s neck swelled, and she laid down the glass with a horrible grimace: her eyes were full of tears. The dark-haired lady at the next table, emerging for an instant from her morose abstraction, glanced at her indignantly.

‘Pah!’ said Ivich. ‘How it burns: it’s fire!’

‘I’ll buy you a bottle to practise on,’ said Boris.

Ivich reflected for a moment. ‘It would be much better for me to train on
marc
, it’s stronger.’

And she added with a rueful air, ‘I think I shall be able to enjoy myself now.’

No one replied. She turned briskly towards Mathieu: it was the first time she had looked at him.

‘I suppose you can stand a lot of alcohol?’

‘He’s a terror,’ said Boris, ‘I’ve seen him drink seven whiskies one day when he was talking to me about Kant. In the end I stopped listening, I was tight enough for the two of us.’

It was true: even in that way Mathieu could not sink his consciousness. All the time he was drinking, he took a stronger hold on — what? On what?: Suddenly he saw a vision of Gauguin, a broad, pallid face with desolate eyes. ‘On my human dignity,’ he thought. He was afraid that if he lost grip of himself for an instant he would suddenly find within his head, astray and drifting like a summer haze, the thought of a fly or a cockroach.

‘I have a horror of being tight,’ he explained apologetically. ‘I drink, but my whole body revolts against drunkenness.’

‘And yet you’re obstinate,’ said Boris with admiration. ‘As obstinate as an old mule.’

‘I’m not obstinate, I’m highly strung: I don’t know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me — it’s a form of self-protection.’ And he added ironically, as though to himself: ‘I’m a thinking reed.’

As though to himself
. But it wasn’t true, he wasn’t being sincere: he really wanted to please Ivich. ‘So,’ he thought, ‘I’ve got to that point.’ He had begun to exploit his own downfall, he did not scorn to extract some small advantages from it, indeed he used it to flatter young women. ‘Rotter!’ He stopped in consternation: when he used that epithet to himself, he was not sincere either, he was not really indignant. It was a trick to retrieve himself, he thought, to save himself from humiliation by such ‘frankness’, but the frankness cost him nothing, indeed it entertained him. And the very judgement that he passed upon his own frankness, this dodge of climbing on to his own shoulders... ‘I must transform myself to the very bones.’ But nothing could help him to do that: all his thoughts were tainted from their origin. Suddenly, Mathieu began to open gently like a wound: he saw himself exposed and as he was: thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, thoughts about thoughts of thoughts, he was transparent and corrupt beyond any finite vision. Then the vision vanished, he found himself sitting opposite Ivich, who was eyeing him with a rather quizzical expression.

‘Well?’ he said to her. ‘So you’ve been doing some work lately.’

Ivich shrugged her shoulders angrily. ‘I don’t want to talk about that. I’m sick of it, I’m here to enjoy myself.’

‘She spent the day curled up on her sofa, with eyes like saucers.’ And Boris added with pride, ignoring the black looks which his sister flung at him: ‘She’s a queer girl, she could die of cold in the middle of the summer.’

Ivich had been shivering for many a long hour, and sobbing too perhaps. But she showed no sign of it at the moment: she had dabbed a little blue on her eyelids and raspberry-red on her lips, her cheeks were flushed with alcohol; she looked resplendent.

‘I want this to be a grand evening,’ she said, ‘as it’s my last.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Yes it is,’ she said doggedly, ‘I shall be ploughed, I’m certain, and I shall go away immediately; I shan’t be able to stay a day longer in Paris. Or possibly...’

She fell silent

‘Or possibly?’

‘Nothing. Don’t let’s talk any more about it, please, it makes me feel ashamed. Ah — here’s the champagne,’ she said gaily.

Mathieu eyed the bottle and thought: ‘350 francs.’ The fellow who had spoken to him the day before in the Rue Vercingétorix, was a wash-out too, but on a modest footing — no champagne and agreeable follies: and, moreover, he was hungry. Mathieu was revolted by the bottle. It was heavy and black, with a white napkin round its neck. The waiter, bending over the ice-pail with a stiff and reverential air, twirled it dexterously with his fingertips. Mathieu was still looking at the bottle, he was still thinking of the fellow of the day before, and felt his heart contract with genuine anguish: but at that moment, a decorous young man appeared on the platform, and chanted through a megaphone: ‘Oh yes he threw a winner — Did Émile.’

Here was that bottle revolving ceremoniously between those pallid fingers, and here were all those people stewing in their juice without making any fuss at all. ‘Well,’ thought Mathieu, ‘he smelt of cheap red wine; so there’s really no difference. Anyway, I don’t like champagne.’ He saw the dancing-hall as a miniature hell, as light as a soap-bubble, and he smiled.

‘What do you find so funny?’ asked Boris, laughing in anticipation.

‘I’ve just remembered that I don’t like champagne either.’

Whereupon they all three burst out laughing. Ivich’s laugh was rather shrill: the neighbouring lady turned her head and looked her up and down.

‘We’re very cheerful!’ said Boris. And he added, ‘We might empty it into the ice-pail when the waiter has gone.’

‘Just as you like,’ said Mathieu.

‘No,’ said Ivich, ‘I want to drink, I’ll drink the whole bottle if you don’t want any.’

The waiter filled their glasses, and Mathieu raised his gloomily to his lips. Ivich looked at hers with an air of perplexity.

‘It wouldn’t be bad,’ said Boris, ‘if it were served hot.’

The white lights went out, the red lights came on, and a roll of drums echoed through the room. A short, bald, paunchy gentleman in a dinner-jacket jumped on to the platform, and began to smile into a megaphone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the management of the Sumatra has great pleasure in presenting to you Miss Ellinor on her first appearance in Paris. Miss El-li-nor,’ he repeated. ‘Ha!’

At the first chords from a dulcimer, a tall, blonde girl entered the room. She was naked, and her body, in the crimsoned air, looked like a long strip of cotton. Mathieu turned to Ivich: she was gazing at the naked girl with her pale, wide open eyes: she had assumed her convulsed and cruel expression.

‘I know her,’ whispered Boris.

The girl danced, agonizing in the desire to please: she seemed amateurish; she flung her legs vehemently to and fro, and her feet stood out like fingers at the extremities of her legs.

‘She can’t keep that up,’ said Boris. ‘She’ll collapse.’

And in fact her long limbs looked disquietingly fragile: when she put her feet on the floor, her legs quivered from the ankles to the thighs. She came up to the edge of the platform and turned round: ‘Oh Lord,’ thought Mathieu wearily, ‘she’s going to do the backside act.’ From time to time the music was drowned by bursts of conversation.

‘She can’t dance,’ said Ivich’s neighbour, with set lips. ‘With drinks at thirty-five francs, the show ought to be first-rate.’

‘They’ve got Lola Montero,’ said her large companion.

‘That doesn’t matter; it’s a disgrace, they’ve picked that girl up in the street.’

The woman sipped her cocktail and began to fidget with her rings. Mathieu looked round the room — all the faces were stern and critical: the audience were enjoying their own disfavour: the girl seemed to them doubly naked, because she was so clumsy. She looked as though she sensed their hostility and yearned to placate them. Mathieu was struck by her wild desire to give satisfaction: she thrust out her parted thighs in a frenzied effort that wrung the very heart.

‘She’s trying very hard,’ said Boris.

‘It won’t be any use,’ said Mathieu, ‘they want to be treated with respect.’

‘They want to see backsides.’

‘Yes, but that sort of thing needs to be neatly done.’

For a moment the dancer’s legs tapped the floor beneath that gay but ineffectual posterior, then she stood up, smiled, raised her arms and shook them: a shiver rippled down them, slid over the shoulder-blades and vanished in the hollow of the back.

‘Well, I never saw such a stick of a girl,’ said Boris.

Mathieu did not answer, he had been thinking about Ivich. He did not dare look at her, but he remembered her air of cruelty: when all was said, she was like the rest — the nasty little creature: doubly protected by her charm and her unassuming frock, she was possessed by all the sensations of the vilest of her kind, as her eyes devoured that poor naked flesh. A flood of bitterness rose to Mathieu’s lips, and brought a taint of poison to his mouth. ‘She needn’t have troubled to make such a fuss this morning.’ He turned his head slightly, and caught sight of Ivich’s fist lying clenched upon the table. The thumb-nail, scarlet and sharpened, pointed to the dance-floor like an arrow on a dial. ‘She is quite alone,’ he thought; ‘she is hiding her wrecked face under her hair, she is sitting with her thighs together, and enjoying it!’ The idea was more than he could bear, he nearly got up and went, but had not the strength of will, and merely thought: ‘And I love that girl for her purity.’ The dancer, with her hands on her hips, was shifting sideways on her heels, she brushed her hip against the table, Mathieu wished his desires could have been aroused by that large and cheerful tail beneath the wriggling back-bone, if only to distract him from his thoughts, or to put Ivich out of countenance. The girl was now crouching, legs apart, slowly swaying to and fro, like one of those pale lanterns swung by night in wayside railway stations by an invisible arm.

‘Pah!’ said Ivich. ‘I shan’t look at her any more.’

Mathieu turned towards her with astonishment, he saw a triangular face, distorted by anger and disgust. ‘So she was not excited,’ he realized with thankfulness. Ivich shuddered, he tried to smile at her, but his head was echoing with the sound of fairy-bells: Boris, Ivich, the obscene body, and the purple mist, slid out of his ken. He was alone, there were Bengal lights in the distance, and, in the smoke, a four-legged monster turning cartwheels, and the festive strains of a band that reached him in gusts through a damp rustle of foliage. ‘What can be the matter with me?’ he asked himself. It was like what had happened in the morning: all this was just a mere
performance
; Mathieu was somewhere else.

The band came to a stop, and the girl stood motionless, turning her face towards the hall. Above her smile were lovely, agonized eyes. No one applauded and there were a few jeers.

‘Brutes!’ said Boris.

He clapped loudly. Astonished faces turned towards him.

‘Be quiet,’ said Ivich, ‘you mustn’t applaud.’

‘She does her best,’ said Boris, applauding.

‘All the more reason.’

‘I know her,’ he said; ‘I’ve dined with her and Lola, she’s a good sort of girl, but silly.’

The girl disappeared, smiling and blowing kisses. A white light flooded the room, this was the moment of awakening: the audience were relieved to find themselves in their own company again after justice had been done. Ivich’s neighbour lit a cigarette, and smiled a winning smile solely for her benefit. Mathieu did not awaken, this was a white nightmare; faces aglow all round him with laughing, limp complacency; most of them apparently uninhabited — mine must be like that, with the same alertness in the eyes and the corners of the mouth, and yet only too obviously hollow; it was a nightmare figure of a man who jumped on to the platform and waved for silence; there was a foretaste of the surprise he expected, and an affected nonchalance, in his mere announcement into the megaphone of the celebrated name: ‘Lola Montero!’