Читать книгу Christmas Holiday - W. Somerset Maugham - Страница 4

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They were nearly there. The attendants were collecting the luggage and piling it up inside the door so that it could be conveniently handed down to the porters. Women put a last dab of lipstick on their mouths and were helped into their furs. Men struggled into their greatcoats and put on their hats. The propinquity in which these persons had sat for a few hours, the pleasant warmth of the Pullman, had made a corporate unity of them, separated as occupants of a coach with its own number from the occupants of other coaches; but now they fell asunder, and each one, or each group of two or three, regained the discreet individuality which for a while had been merged in that of all the others. In the smoke-laden air, rank with stale tobacco, strong scent, the odour of human bodies and the frowst of steam-heating, they acquired on a sudden an air of mystery. Strangers once more, they looked at one another with preoccupied, unseeing eyes. Each one felt in himself a vague hostility to his neighbour. Some were already queuing up in the passage so that they might get out quickly. The heat of the Pullman had coated the windows with vapour and Charley wiped them a bit clean with his hand to look out. He could see nothing.

The train ran into the station. Charley gave his bag to a porter and with long steps walked up the platform; he was expecting his friend Simon Fenimore to meet him. He was disappointed not to see him at once; but there was a great mob at the barrier and he supposed that he was waiting there. He scanned eagerly the eager faces; he passed through; persons struggled through the crowd to seize a new arrival’s hand; women kissed one another; he could not see his friend. He was so convinced he must be there that he lingered for a little, but he was intimidated by his porter’s obvious impatience and presently followed him out to the courtyard. He felt vaguely let down. The porter got him a taxi and Charley gave the driver the name of the hotel where Simon had taken a room for him. When the Leslie Masons went to Paris they always stayed at an hotel in the Rue St. Honoré. It was exclusively patronised by English and Americans, but after twenty years they still cherished the delusion that it was a discovery of their own, essentially French, and when they saw American luggage on a landing or went up in the lift with persons who could be nothing but English, they never ceased to be surprised.

“I wonder how on earth they happen to be here,” they said.

For their own part they had always been careful never to speak about it to their friends; when they had hit upon a little bit of old France they weren’t going to risk its being spoilt. Though the director and the porter talked English fluently they always spoke to them in their own halting French, convinced that this was the only language they knew. But the mere fact that he had so often been to this hotel with his family was a sufficient reason for Charley not to stay there when he was going to Paris by himself. He was bent on adventure, and a respectable family hotel, where, according to his parents, nobody went but the French provincial nobility, was hardly the right place for the glorious, wild and romantic experiences with which his imagination for the last month had been distracting his mind. So he had written to Simon asking him to get him a room somewhere in the Latin Quarter; he wasn’t particular about sanitary conveniences and didn’t mind how grubby it was so long as it had the right atmosphere; and Simon in due course had written back to tell him that he had engaged a room at a hotel near the Gare Montparnasse. It was in a quiet street just off the Rue de Rennes and conveniently near the Rue Campagne Première, where he himself lived.

Charley quickly got over his disappointment that Simon had not come to meet him—he was sure either to be at the hotel or to have telephoned to say that he would be round immediately—and driving through the crowded streets that lead from the Gare du Nord to the Seine his spirits rose. It was wonderful to arrive in Paris by night. A drizzling rain was falling and it gave the streets an exciting mystery. The shops were brightly lit. The pavements were multitudinous with umbrellas and the water dripping on them glistened dimly under the street lamps. Charley remembered one of Renoir’s pictures. Sometimes a gust of wind made women crouch under their umbrellas and their skirts swirled round their legs. His taxi drove furiously, to his prudent English idea, and he gasped whenever with a screeching of brakes it pulled up suddenly to avoid a collision. The red lights held them up at a crossing and in both directions a great stream of persons surged over like a panic-stricken mob flying before a police charge. To Charley’s excited gaze they seemed quite different from an English crowd, more alert, more eager; when by chance his eyes fell on a girl walking by herself, a sempstress or a typist going home after the day’s work, it delighted him to fancy that she was hurrying to meet her lover; and when he saw a pair walking arm-in-arm under an umbrella, a young man with a beard, in a broad-brimmed hat, and a girl with a fur round her neck, walking as though it were such bliss to be together they did not mind the rain and were unconscious of the jostling throng, he thrilled with a poignant and sympathetic joy. At one corner owing to a block his taxi was side by side with a handsome limousine. There sat in it a woman in a sable coat, with painted cheeks and painted lips and a profile of incredible distinction. She might have been the Duchesse de Guermantes driving back after a tea party to her house in the Boulevard St. Germain. It was wonderful to be twenty-three and in Paris on one’s own.

“By God, what a time I’m going to have!”

The hotel was grander than he had expected. Its façade, with its architectural embellishments, suggested the flamboyant taste of the late Baron Haussmann. He found that a room had been engaged for him, but Simon had left neither letter nor message. He was taken upstairs not as he had anticipated by a slovenly boots in a dirty apron, with a sinister look on his ill-shaven face, but by an affable director who spoke perfect English and wore a morning coat. The room was furnished with hygienic severity, and there were two beds in it, but the director assured him that he would only charge him for the use of one. He showed Charley with pride the communicating bathroom. Left to himself Charley looked about him. He had expected a little room with heavy curtains of dull rep, a wooden bed with a huge eiderdown and an old mahogany wardrobe with a large mirror; he had expected to find used hairpins on the dressing-table and in the drawer of the table de nuit half a lipstick and a broken comb in which a few dyed hairs were still entangled. That was the idea his romantic fancy had formed of a student’s room in the Latin Quarter. A bathroom! That was the last thing he had bargained for. This room might have been a room in one of the cheaper hotels in Switzerland to which he had sometimes been with his parents. It was clean, threadbare and sordid. Not even Charley’s ardent imagination could invest it with mystery. He unpacked his bag disconsolately. He had a bath. He thought it rather casual of Simon, even if he could not be bothered to meet him, not to have left a message. If he made no sign of life he would have to dine by himself. His father and mother and Patsy would have got down to Godalming by now; there was going to be a jolly party, Sir Wilfred’s two sons and their wives and two nieces of Lady Terry-Mason’s. There would be music, games and dancing. He half wished now that he hadn’t jumped at his father’s offer to spend the holiday in Paris. It suddenly occurred to him that Simon had perhaps had to go off somewhere for his paper and in the hurry of an unexpected departure had forgotten to let him know. His heart sank.

Simon Fenimore was Charley’s oldest friend and indeed it was to spend a few days with him that he had been so eager to come to Paris. They had been at a private school together and together at Rugby; they had been at Cambridge together too, but Simon had left without taking a degree, at the end of his second year in fact, because he had come to the conclusion that he was wasting time; and it was Charley’s father who had got him on to the London newspaper for which for the last year he had been one of the Paris correspondents. Simon was alone in the world. His father was in the Indian Forest Department and while Simon was still a young child had divorced his mother for promiscuous adultery. She had left India, and Simon, by order of the court in his father’s custody, was sent to England and put into a clergyman’s family till he was old enough to go to school. His mother vanished into obscurity. He had no notion whether she was alive or dead. His father died of cirrhosis of the liver when Simon was twelve and he had but a vague recollection of a thin, slightly-built man with a sallow, lined face and a tight-lipped mouth. He left only just enough money to educate his son. The Leslie Masons had been touched by the poor boy’s loneliness and had made a point of asking him to spend a good part of his holidays with them. As a boy he was thin and weedy, with a pale face in which his black eyes looked enormous, a great quantity of straight dark hair which was always in need of a brush, and a large, sensual mouth. He was talkative, forward for his age, a great reader, and clever. He had none of the diffidence which was in Charley such an engaging trait. Venetia Mason, though from a sense of duty she tried hard, could not like him. She could not understand why Charley had taken a fancy to someone who was in every way so unlike him. She thought Simon pert and conceited. He was insensible to kindness and took everything that was done for him as a matter of course. She had a suspicion that he had no very high opinion either of her or of Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting, Simon would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker. You would have thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid. Now and then when they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together, chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away, and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though he were by himself. It gave you the impression that their conversation wasn’t worth listening to. It wasn’t even polite. But Venetia Mason chid herself.

“Poor lamb, he’s never had a chance to learn manners. I will be nice to him. I will like him.”

Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body (“It’s awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his dinner-jacket are too short for him already”), his curling brown hair, his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin. Though perhaps he hadn’t Simon’s showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his fingers’ ends. But who could tell what he might have become if she had run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had had, like Simon, to fend for himself? Poor Simon! Next day she went out and bought him half a dozen ties. He seemed pleased.

“I say, that’s jolly decent of you. I’ve never had more than two ties at one time in my life.”

Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.

“You poor lonely boy,” she cried, “it’s so dreadful for you to have no parents.”

“Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I dare say I don’t miss much.”

He was seventeen when he said this.

It was no good, Venetia simply couldn’t like him. He was harsh, cynical and unscrupulous. It exasperated her to see how much Charley admired him; Charley thought him brilliant and anticipated a great career for him. Even Leslie was impressed by the extent of his reading and the clearness with which even as a boy he expressed himself. At school he was already an ardent socialist and at Cambridge he became a communist. Leslie listened to his wild theories with good-humoured tolerance. To him it was all talk, and talk, he had an instinctive feeling, was just talk; it didn’t touch the essential business of life.

“And if he does become a well-known journalist or gets into the House, there’ll be no harm in having a friend in the enemy’s camp.”

Leslie’s ideas were liberal, so liberal that he didn’t mind admitting the socialists had several notions that no reasonable man could object to; theoretically he was all in favour of the nationalisation of the coal-mines, and he didn’t see why the state shouldn’t run the public services as well as private companies; but he didn’t think they should go too far. Ground rents, for instance, that was a matter that was really no concern of the state; and slum property: in a great city you had to have slums, in point of fact the lower classes preferred them to model dwelling-houses, not that the Mason Estate hadn’t done what it could in this direction; but you couldn’t expect a landlord to let people live in his houses for nothing, and it was only fair that he should get a decent return on his capital.

Simon Fenimore had decided that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent for some years so that he could gain a knowledge of Continental politics which would enable him when he entered the House of Commons to be an expert on a subject of which most Labour members were necessarily ignorant; but when Leslie took him to see the proprietor of the newspaper who was prepared to give a brilliant young man his chance, he warned him that the proprietor was a very rich man, and that he could not expect to create a favourable impression if he delivered himself of revolutionary sentiments. Simon, however, made a very good impression on the magnate by the modesty of his demeanour, his air of energy and his easy conversation.

“He was as good as gold,” Leslie told his wife afterwards. “He’s got his head screwed on his shoulders all right, that young fellow. It’s what I always told you, talk doesn’t amount to anything really. When it comes down to getting a job with a living wage attached to it, like every sensible man he’s prepared to put his theories in his pocket.”

Venetia agreed with him. It was quite possible, their own experience proved it, to have a real love for beauty and at the same time to realise the importance of material things. Look at Lorenzo de’ Medici; he’d been a successful banker and an artist to his finger-tips. She thought it very good of Leslie to have taken so much trouble to do a service for someone who was incapable of gratitude. Anyhow the job he had got him would take Simon to Vienna and thus remove Charley from an influence which she had always regarded with misgiving. It was that wild talk of his that had put it into the boy’s head that he wanted to be an artist. It was all very well for Simon, he hadn’t a penny in the world and no connections; but Charley had a snug berth to go into. There were enough artists in the world. Her consolation had been that Charley had so much candour of soul and a disposition of such sweetness that no evil communications could corrupt his good manners.

At this moment Charley was dressing himself and wondering, forlorn, how he should spend the evening. When he had got his trousers on he rang up the office of Simon’s newspaper, and it was Simon himself who answered.

“Simon.”

“Hulloa, have you turned up? Where are you?”

Simon seemed so casual that Charley was taken aback.

“At the hotel.”

“Oh, are you? Doing anything to-night?”

“No.”

“We’d better dine together, shall we? I’ll stroll around and fetch you.”

He rang off. Charley was dashed. He had expected Simon to be as eager to see him as he was to see Simon, but from Simon’s words and from his manner you would have thought that they were casual acquaintances and that it was a matter of indifference to him if they met or not. Of course it was two years since they’d seen one another and in that time Simon might have changed out of all recognition. Charley had a sudden fear that his visit to Paris was going to be a failure and he awaited Simon’s arrival with a nervousness that annoyed him. But when at last he walked into the room there was in his appearance at least little alteration. He was now twenty-three and he was still the lanky fellow, though only of average height, that he had always been. He was shabbily dressed in a brown jacket and grey flannel trousers and wore neither hat nor great-coat. His long face was thinner and paler than ever and his black eyes seemed larger. They were never still. Hard, shining, inquisitive, suspicious, they seemed to indicate the quality of the brain behind. His mouth was large and ironical, and he had small irregular teeth that somewhat reminded you of one of the smaller beasts of prey. With his pointed chin and prominent cheek-bones he was not good-looking, but his expression was so high-strung, there was in it so strange a disquiet, that you could hardly have passed him in the street without taking notice of him. At fleeting moments his face had a sort of tortured beauty, not a beauty of feature but the beauty of a restless, striving spirit. A disturbing thing about him was that there was no gaiety in his smile, it was a sardonic grimace, and when he laughed his face was contorted as though he were suffering from an agony of pain. His voice was high-pitched; it did not seem to be quite under his control, and when he grew excited often rose to shrillness.

Charley, restraining his natural impulse to run to the door and wring his hand with the eager friendliness of his happy nature, received him coolly. When there was a knock he called “Come in,” and went on filing his nails. Simon did not offer to shake hands. He nodded as though they had met already in the course of the day.

“Hulloa!” he said. “Room all right?”

“Oh, yes. The hotel’s a bit grander than I expected.”

“It’s convenient and you can bring anyone in you like. I’m starving. Shall we go along and eat?”

“O.K.”

“Let’s go to the Coupole.”

They sat down opposite one another at a table upstairs and ordered their dinner. Simon gave Charley an appraising look.

“I see you haven’t lost your looks, Charley,” he said with his wry smile.

“Luckily they’re not my fortune.”

Charley was feeling a trifle shy. The separation had for the moment at all events destroyed the old intimacy there had so long been between them. Charley was a good listener, he had indeed been trained to be so from early childhood, and he was never unwilling to sit silent while Simon poured out his ideas with eloquent confusion. Charley had always disinterestedly admired him; he was convinced he was a genius, so that it seemed quite natural to play second fiddle to him. He had an affection for Simon because he was alone in the world and nobody much liked him, whereas he himself had a happy home and was in easy circumstances; and it gave him a sense of comfort that Simon, who cared for so few people, cared for him. Simon was often bitter and sarcastic, but with him he could also be strangely gentle. In one of his rare moments of expansion he had told him that he was the only person in the world that he gave a damn for. But now Charley felt with malaise that there was a barrier between them. Simon’s restless eyes darted from his face to his hands, paused for an instant on his new suit and then glanced rapidly at his collar and tie; he felt that Simon was not surrendering himself as he had to him alone in the old days, but was holding back, critical and aloof; he seemed to be taking stock of him as if he were a stranger and he were making-up his mind what sort of a person this was. It made Charley uncomfortable and he was sore at heart.

“How d’you like being a business man?” asked Simon.

Charley faintly coloured. After all the talks they had had in the past he was prepared for Simon to treat him with derision because he had in the end fallen in with his father’s wishes, but he was too honest to conceal the truth.

“I like it much better than I expected. I find the work very interesting and it’s not hard. I have plenty of time to myself.”

“I think you’ve shown a lot of sense,” Simon answered, to his surprise. “What did you want to be a painter or a pianist for? There’s a great deal too much art in the world. Art’s a lot of damned rot anyway.”

“Oh, Simon!”

“Are you still taken in by the artistic pretensions of your excellent parents? You must grow up, Charley. Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich. Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense.”

“I should have thought ...”

“I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to a nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“The people want dope and it may be that art is the best form in which we can give it them. But they’re not ready for it yet. At present it’s another form they want.”

“What is that?”

“Words.”

It was extraordinary, the sardonic vigour he put into the monosyllable. But he smiled, and though his lips grimaced Charley saw in his eyes for a moment that same look of good-humoured affection that he had been accustomed to see in them.

“No, my boy,” he continued, “you have a good time, go to your office every day and enjoy yourself. It can’t last very long now and you may just as well get all the fun out of it that you can.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Never mind. We’ll talk about it some other time. Tell me, what have you come to Paris for?”

“Well, chiefly to see you.”

Simon flushed darkly. You would have thought that a word of kindness, and when Charley spoke you could never doubt that it was from the heart, horribly embarrassed him.

“And besides that?”

“I want to see some pictures, and if there’s anything good in the theatre I’d like to go. And I want to have a bit of a lark generally.”

“I suppose you mean by that that you want to have a woman.”

“I don’t get much opportunity in London, you know.”

“Later on I’ll take you to the Sérail.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see. It’s not bad fun.”

They began to talk of Simon’s experiences in Vienna, but he was reticent about them.

“It took me some time to find my feet. You see, I’d never been out of England before. I learnt German. I read a great deal. I thought. I met a lot of people who interested me.”

“And since then, in Paris?”

“I’ve been doing more or less the same thing; I’ve been putting my ideas in order. I’m young. I’ve got plenty of rime. When I’m through with Paris I shall go to Rome, Berlin or Moscow. If I can’t get a job with the paper, I shall get some other job; I can always teach English and earn enough to keep body and soul together. I wasn’t born in the purple and I can do without things. In Vienna, as an exercise in self-denial, I lived for a month on bread and milk. It wasn’t even a hardship. I’ve trained myself now to do with one meal a day.”

“D’you mean to say this is your first meal to-day?”

“I had a cup of coffee when I got up and a glass of milk at one.”

“But what’s the object of it? You’re adequately paid in your job, aren’t you?”

“I get a living wage. Certainly enough to have three meals a day. Who can achieve mastery over others unless he first achieves mastery over himself?”

Charley grinned. He was beginning to feel more at his ease.

“That sounds like a tag out of a dictionary of quotations.”

“It may be,” Simon replied indifferently. “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve. A proverb distils the wisdom of the ages and only a fool is scornful of the commonplace. You don’t suppose I intend to be a foreign correspondent for a London paper or a teacher of English all my life. These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important: an unconquerable will. I want to mould myself as the Jesuit novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order. I think I’ve always known myself; there’s nothing that teaches you what you are, like being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your life with people to whom you mean nothing. But my knowledge was instinctive. In these two years I’ve been abroad I’ve learnt to know myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid. I know my strength and my weakness and I’m ready to spend the next five or six years cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness. I’m going to take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him. I’ve got a good brain. There’s no one in the world who can see to the end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and, believe me, in the world we live in that’s a great force. I can talk. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words and, however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending. Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I’m through I shall be able to do anything.”

Simon took a long draught of the white wine they were drinking and sitting back in his chair began to laugh. His face writhed into a grimace of intolerable suffering.

“I must tell you an incident that happened a few months ago here. They were having a meeting of the British Legion or something like that, I forget what for, war graves or something; my chief was going to speak, but he had a cold in the head and he sent me instead. You know what our paper is, bloody patriotic as long as it helps our circulation, all the dirt we can get, and a high moral tone. My chief’s the right man in the right place. He hasn’t had an idea in his head for twenty years. He never opens his mouth without saying the obvious and when he tells a dirty story it’s so stale that it doesn’t even stink any more. But he’s as shrewd as they make ’em. He knows what the proprietor wants and he gives it to him. Well, I made the speech he would have made. Platitudes dripped from my mouth. I made the welkin ring with claptrap. I gave them jokes so hoary that even a judge would have been ashamed to make them. They roared with laughter. I gave them pathos so shaming that you would have thought they would vomit. The tears rolled down their cheeks. I beat the big drum of patriotism like a Salvation Lass sublimating her repressed sex. They cheered me to the echo. It was the speech of the evening. When it was all over the big-wigs wrung my hand still overwhelmed with emotion. I got them all right. And d’you know, I didn’t say a single word that I didn’t know was contemptible balderdash. Words, words, words! Poor old Hamlet.”

“It was a damned unscrupulous thing to do,” said Charley. “After all, I dare say they were just a lot of ordinary, decent fellows who were only wanting to do what they thought was the right thing, and what’s more they were probably prepared to put their hands in their pockets to prove the sincerity of their convictions.”

“You would think that. In point of fact more money was raised for whatever the damned cause was than had ever been raised before at one of their meetings and the organisers told my chief it was entirely due to my brilliant speech.”

Charley in his candour was distressed. This was not the Simon he had known so long. Formerly, however wild his theories were, however provocatively expressed, there was a sort of nobility in them. He was disinterested. His indignation was directed against oppression and cruelty. Injustice roused him to fury. But Simon did not notice the effect he had on Charley or if he did was indifferent to it. He was absorbed in himself.

“But brain isn’t enough and eloquence, even if it’s necessary, is after all a despicable gift. Kerensky had them both and what did they avail him? The important thing is character. It’s my character I’ve got to mould. I’m sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It’s only a matter of will. I’ve got to train myself so that I’m indifferent to insult, neglect and ridicule. I’ve got to acquire a spiritual aloofness so complete that if they put me in prison I shall feel myself as free as a bird in the air. I’ve got to make myself so strong that when I make mistakes I am unshaken, but profit by them to act rightly. I’ve got to make myself so hard that not only can I resist the temptation to be pitiful, but I don’t even feel pity. I’ve got to wring out of my heart the possibility of love.”

“Why?”

“I can’t afford to let my judgment be clouded by any feeling that I might have for a human being. You are the only person I’ve ever cared for in the world, Charley. I shan’t rest till I know in my bones that if it were necessary to put you against a wall and shoot you with my own hands I could do it without a moment’s hesitation and without a moment’s regret.”

Simon’s eyes had a dark opaqueness which reminded you of an old mirror, in a deserted house, from which the quicksilver was worn away, so that when you looked in it you saw, not yourself, but a sombre depth in which seemed to lurk the reflections of long-past events and passions long since dead and yet in some terrifying way tremulous still with a borrowed and mysterious life.

“Did you wonder why I didn’t come to the station to meet you?”

“It would have been nice if you had. I supposed you couldn’t get away.”

“I knew you’d be disappointed. It’s our busy time at the office, we have to be on tap then to telephone to London the news that’s come through in the course of the day, but it’s Christmas Eve, the paper doesn’t come out to-morrow and I could have got away easily. I didn’t come because I wanted to so much. Ever since I got your letter saying you were coming over I’ve been sick with the desire to see you. When the train was due and I knew you’d be wandering up the platform looking for me and rather lost in that struggling crowd, I took a book and began to read. I sat there, forcing myself to attend to it, and refusing to let myself listen for the telephone that I expected every moment to ring. And when it did and I knew it was you, my joy was so intense that I was enraged with myself. I almost didn’t answer. For more than two years now I’ve been striving to rid myself of the feeling I have for you. Shall I tell you why I wanted you to come over? One idealises people when they’re away, it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when one sees them again one’s often surprised that one saw anything in them at all. I thought that if there were anything left in me of the old feeling I had for you the few days you’re spending here now would be enough to kill it.”

“I’m afraid you’ll think me very stupid,” said Charley, with his engaging smile, “but I can’t for the life of me see why you want to.”

“I do think you’re very stupid.”

“Well, taking that for granted, what is the reason?”

Simon frowned a little and his restless eyes darted here and there like a hare trying to escape a pursuer.

“You’re the only person who ever cared for me.”

“That’s not true. My father and mother have always been very fond of you.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense. Your father was as indifferent to me as he is to art, but it gave him a warm, comfortable feeling of benevolence to be kind to the orphan penniless boy whom he could patronise and impress. Your mother thought me unscrupulous and self-seeking. She hated the influence she thought I had over you and she was affronted because she saw that I thought your father an old humbug, the worst sort of humbug, the one who humbugs himself; the only satisfaction I ever gave her was that she couldn’t look at me without thinking how nice it was that you were so very different from me.”

“You’re not very flattering to my poor parents,” said Charley, mildly.

Simon took no notice of the interruption.

“We clicked at once. What that old bore Goethe would have called elective affinity. You gave me what I’d never had. I, who’d never been a boy, could be a boy with you. I could forget myself in you. I bullied you and ragged you and mocked you and neglected you, but all the time I worshipped you. I felt wonderfully at home with you. With you I could be just myself. You were so unassuming, so easily pleased, so gay and so good-natured, merely to be with you rested my tortured nerves and released me for a moment from that driving force that urged me on and on. But I don’t want rest and I don’t want release. My will falters when I look at your sweet and diffident smile. I can’t afford to be soft, I can’t afford to be tender. When I look into those blue eyes of yours, so friendly, so confiding in human nature, I waver, and I daren’t waver. You’re my enemy and I hate you.”

Charley had flushed uncomfortably at some of the things that Simon had said to him, but now he chuckled good-humouredly.

“Oh, Simon, what stuff and nonsense you talk.”

Simon paid no attention. He fixed Charley with his glittering, passionate eyes as though he sought to bore into the depths of his being.

“Is there anything there?” he said, as though speaking to himself. “Or is it merely an accident of expression that gives the illusion of some quality of the soul?” And then to Charley: “I’ve often asked myself what it was that I saw in you. It wasn’t your good looks, though I dare say they had something to do with it; it wasn’t your intelligence, which is adequate without being remarkable; it wasn’t your guileless nature or your good temper. What is it in you that makes people take to you at first sight? You’ve won half your battle before ever you take the field. Charm? What is charm? It’s one of the words we all know the meaning of, but we can none of us define. But I know if I had that gift of yours, with my brain and my determination there’s no obstacle in the world I couldn’t surmount. You’ve got vitality and that’s part of charm. But I have just as much vitality as you; I can do with four hours’ sleep for days on end and I can work for sixteen hours a day without getting tired. When people first meet me they’re antagonistic, I have to conquer them by sheer brain-power, I have to play on their weaknesses, I have to make myself useful to them, I have to flatter them. When I came to Paris my chief thought me the most disagreeable young man and the most conceited he’d ever met. Of course he’s a fool. How can a man be conceited when he knows his defects as well as I know mine? Now he eats out of my hand. But I’ve had to work like a dog to achieve what you can do with a flicker of your long eyelashes. Charm is essential. In the last two years I’ve got to know a good many prominent politicians and they’ve all got it. Some more and some less. But they can’t all have it by nature. That shows it can be acquired. It means nothing, but it arouses the devotion of their followers so that they’ll do blindly all they’re bidden and be satisfied with the reward of a kind word. I’ve examined them at work. They can turn it on like water from a tap. The quick, friendly smile; the hand that’s so ready to clasp yours. The warmth in the voice that seems to promise favours, the show of interest that leads you to think your concerns are your leader’s chief preoccupation, the intimate manner which tells you nothing, but deludes you into thinking you are in your master’s confidence. The clichés, the hundred varieties of “dear old boy” that are so flattering on influential lips. The ease and naturalness, the perfect acting that imitates nature, and the sensitiveness that discerns a fool’s vanity and takes care never to affront it. I can learn all that, it only means a little more effort and a little more self-control. Sometimes of course they overdo it, the pros, their charm becomes so mechanical that it ceases to work; people see through it, and feeling they’ve been duped are resentful.” He gave Charley another of his piercing glances. “Your charm is natural, that’s why it’s so devastating. Isn’t it absurd that a tiny wrinkle should make life so easy for you?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“One of the reasons why I wanted you to come over was to see exactly in what your charm consisted. As far as I can tell, it depends on some peculiar muscular formation of your lower orbit. I believe it to be due to a little crease under your eyes when you smile.”

It embarrassed Charley to be thus anatomised, and to divert the conversation from himself he asked:

“But all this effort of yours, what is it going to lead you to?”

“Who can tell? Let’s go and have our coffee at the Dôme.”

“All right. I’ll get hold of a waiter.”

“I’m going to stand you your dinner. It’s the first meal that we’ve had together that I’ve ever paid for.”

When he took out of his pocket some notes to settle up with he found with them a couple of cards.

“Oh, look, I’ve got a ticket for you for the Midnight Mass at St. Eustache. It’s supposed to be the best church music in Paris and I thought you’d like to go.”

“Oh, Simon, how nice of you. I should love to. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

“I’ll see how I feel when the time comes. Anyhow take the tickets.”

Charley put them in his pocket. They walked to the Dôme. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still wet and, when the light of a shop window or a street lamp fell upon it, palely glistened. A lot of people were wandering to and fro. They came out of the shadow of the leafless trees as though from the wings of a theatre, passed across the light and then were lost again in another patch of night. Cringing but persistent, the Algerian peddlers, their eyes alert for a possible buyer, passed with a bundle of Eastern rugs and cheap furs over their arms. Coarse-faced boys, a fez on their heads, carried baskets of monkey-nuts and monotonously repeated their raucous cry: cacaouettes, cacaouettes! At a corner stood two negroes, their dark faces pinched with cold, as though time had stopped and they waited because there was nothing in the world to do but wait. The two friends reached the Dôme. The terrace where in summer the customers sat in the open was glassed in. Every table was engaged, but as they came in a couple got up and they took the empty places. It was none too warm, and Simon wore no coat.

“Won’t you be cold?” Charley asked him. “Wouldn’t you prefer to sit inside?”

“No, I’ve taught myself not to mind cold.”

“What happens when you catch one?”

“I ignore it.”

Charley had often heard of the Dôme, but had never been there, and he looked with eager curiosity at the people who sat all round them. There were young men in turtle-neck sweaters, some of them with short beards, and girls bare-headed, in raincoats; he supposed they were painters and writers, and it gave him a little thrill to look at them.

“English or American,” said Simon, with a scornful shrug of the shoulders. “Wasters and rotters most of them, pathetically dressing up for a rôle in a play that has long ceased to be acted.”

Over there was a group of tall, fair-haired youths who looked like Scandinavians, and at another table a swarthy, gesticulating, loquacious band of Levantines. But the greater number were quiet French people, respectably dressed, shopkeepers from the neighbourhood who came to the Dôme because it was convenient, with a sprinkling of provincials who, like Charley, still thought it the resort of artists and students.

“Poor brutes, they haven’t got the money to lead the Latin Quarter life any more. They live on the edge of starvation and work like galley-slaves. I suppose you’ve read the Vie de Bohème? Rodolphe now wears a neat blue suit that he’s bought off the nail and puts his trousers under his mattress every night to keep them in shape. He counts every penny he spends and takes care to do nothing to compromise his future. Mimi and Musette are hard-working girls, trade unionists, who spend their spare evenings attending party meetings, and even if they lose their virtue, keep their heads.”

“Don’t you live with a girl?”

“No.”

“Why not? I should have thought it would be very pleasant. In the year you’ve been in Paris you must have had plenty of chances of picking someone up.”

“Yes, I’ve had one or two. Strange when you come to think of it. D’you know what my place consists of? A studio and a kitchen. No bath. The concierge is supposed to come and clean up every day, but she has varicose veins and hates climbing the stairs. That’s all I have to offer and yet there’ve been three girls who wanted to come and share my squalor with me. One was English, she’s got a job here in the International Communist Bureau, another was a Norwegian, she’s working at the Sorbonne, and one was French—you’d have thought she had more sense; she was a dressmaker and out of work. I picked her up one evening when I was going out to dinner; she told me she hadn’t had a meal all day and I stood her one. It was a Saturday night and she stayed till Monday. She wanted to stay on, but I told her to get out and she went. The Norwegian was rather a nuisance. She wanted to darn my socks and cook for me and scrub the floor. When I told her there was nothing doing she took to waiting for me at street corners, walking beside me in the street and telling me that if I didn’t relent she’d kill herself. She taught me a lesson that I’ve taken to heart. I had to be rather firm with her in the end.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Well, one day I told her that I was sick of her pestering. I told her that next time she addressed me in the street I’d knock her down. She was rather stupid and she didn’t know I meant it. Next day when I came out of my house—it was about twelve and I was just going to the office—she was standing on the other side of the street. She came up to me, with that hang-dog look of hers, and began to speak. I didn’t let her get more than two or three words out, I hit her on the chin and she went down like a nine-pin.”

Simon’s eyes twinkled with amusement.

“What happened then?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she got up again. I walked on and didn’t look round to see. Anyhow she took the hint and that’s the last I saw of her.”

The story made Charley very uncomfortable and at the same time made him want to laugh. But he was ashamed of this and remained silent.

“The comic one was the English communist. My dear, she was the daughter of a dean. She’d been to Oxford and she’d taken her degree in economics. She was terribly genteel, oh, a perfect lady, but she looked upon promiscuous fornication as a sacred duty. Every time she went to bed with a comrade she felt she was helping the Cause. We were to be good pals, fight the good fight together, shoulder to shoulder, and all that sort of thing. The dean gave her an allowance and we were to pool our resources, make my studio a Centre, have the comrades in to afternoon tea and discuss the burning questions of the day. I just told her a few home truths and that finished her.”

He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him. Charley had several things to say, but did not know how to put them so that they should not sound affected and so arouse Simon’s irony.

“But is it your wish to cut human relations out of your life altogether?” he asked, uncertainly.

“Altogether. I’ve got to be free. I daren’t let another person get a hold over me. That’s why I turned out the little sempstress. She was the most dangerous of the lot. She was gentle and affectionate. She had the meekness of the poor who have never dreamt that life can be other than hard. I could never have loved her, but I knew that her gratitude, her adoration, her desire to please, her innocent cheerfulness, were dangerous. I could see that she might easily become a habit of which I couldn’t break myself. Nothing in the world is so insidious as a woman’s flattery; our need for it is so enormous that we become her slave. I must be as impervious to flattery as I am indifferent to abuse. There’s nothing that binds one to a woman like the benefits one confers on her. She would have owed me everything, that girl; I should never have been able to escape from her.”

“But, Simon, you have human passions like the rest of us. You’re twenty-three.”

“And my sexual desires are urgent? Less urgent than you imagine. When you work from twelve to sixteen hours a day and sleep on an average six, when you content yourself with one meal a day, much as it may surprise you, your desires are much attenuated. Paris is singularly well arranged for the satisfaction of the sexual instinct at moderate expense and with the least possible waste of time, and when I find that my appetite is interfering with my work I have a woman just as when I’m constipated I take a purge.”

Charley’s clear blue eyes twinkled with amusement and a charming smile parting his lips displayed his strong white teeth.

“Aren’t you missing a lot of fun? You know, one’s young for such a little while.”

“I may be. I know one can do nothing in the world unless one’s single-minded. Chesterfield said the last word about sexual congress: the pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous, and the expense is damnable. It may be an instinct that one can’t suppress, but the man’s a pitiful fool who allows it to divert him from his chosen path. I’m not afraid of it any more. In a few more years I shall be entirely free from its temptation.”

“Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.”

Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile look.

“I should tear it out of my heart as I’d wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.”

“That’s easier said than done.”

“I know. Nothing that’s worth doing is done easily, but that’s one of the odd things about man: if his self-preservation is concerned, if he has to do something on which his being depends, he can find in himself the strength to do it.”

Charley was silent. If anyone else had spoken to him as Simon had done that evening he would have thought it a pose adopted to impress. Charley had heard during his three years at Cambridge enough extravagant talk to be able, with his commonsense and quiet humour, to attach no more importance to it than it deserved. But he knew that Simon never talked for effect. He was too contemptuous of his fellows’ opinion to extort their admiration by taking up an attitude in which he did not believe. He was fearless and sincere. When he said that he thought this and that, you could be certain that he did, and when he said he had done that and the other you need not hesitate to believe that he had. But just as the manner of life that Simon had described seemed to Charley morbid and unnatural, so the ideas he expressed with a fluency that showed they were well considered seemed to him outrageous and horrible. He noticed that Simon had avoided saying what was the end for which he was thus so sternly disciplining himself; but at Cambridge he had been violently communist and it was natural to suppose that he was training himself to play his part in the revolution they had then, all of them, anticipated in the near future. Charley, much more concerned with the arts, had listened with interest, but without feeling that the matter was any particular affair of his, to the heated arguments he heard in Simon’s rooms. If he had been obliged to state his views on a subject to which he had never given much thought, he would have agreed with his father: whatever might happen on the Continent there was no danger of communism in England; the hash they’d made in Russia showed it was impracticable; there always had been rich and poor in the world and there always would be; the English working man was too shrewd to let himself be led away by a lot of irresponsible agitators; and after all he didn’t have a bad time.

Simon went on. He was eager to deliver himself of thoughts that he had bottled up for many months and he had been used to impart them to Charley for as long as he could remember. Though he reflected upon them with the intensity which was one of his great gifts, he found that they gained in clearness and force when he had this perfect listener to put them to.

“An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end and aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it’s suffocated us. It’s weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform, the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria.”

“But, Simon, the slave population of the ancient world was just the proletariat of to-day.”

Simon’s lips trembled with a smile and the look he fixed on Charley made him feel that he had said a silly thing.

“I know,” said Simon quietly.

For a while his restless eyes were still, but though he looked at Charley his gaze seemed fixed on something in the far distance. Charley did not know of what he thought, but he was conscious of a faint malaise.

“It may be that the habit of two thousand years has made love a human necessity and in that case it must be taken into account. But if dope must be administered the best person to do so is surely not a dope-fiend. If love can be put to some useful purpose it can only be by someone who is himself immune to it.”

“You don’t seem to want to tell me what end you expect to attain by denying yourself everything that makes life pleasant. I wonder if any end can be worth it.”

“What have you been doing with yourself for the last year, Charley?”

The sudden question seemed inconsequent, but he answered it with his usual modest frankness.

“Nothing very much, I’m afraid. I’ve been going to the office pretty well every day; I’ve spent a certain amount of time on the Estate getting to know the properties and all that sort of thing; I’ve played golf with Father. He likes to get in a round two or three days a week. And I’ve kept up with my piano-playing. I’ve been to a good many concerts. I’ve seen most of the picture shows. I’ve been to the opera a bit and seen a certain number of plays.”

“You’ve had a thoroughly good time?”

“Not bad. I’ve enjoyed myself.”

“And what d’you expect to do next year?”

“More or less the same, I should think.”

“And the year after, and the year after that?”

“I suppose in a few years I shall get married and then my father will retire and hand over his job to me. It brings in a thousand a year, not so bad in these days, and of course eventually I shall get my half of my father’s share in the Mason Estate.”

“And then you’ll lead the sort of life your father has led before you?”

“Unless the Labour Party confiscate the Mason Estate. Then of course I shall be in the cart. But until then I’m quite prepared to do my little job and have as much fun as I can on the income I’ve got.”

“And when you die will it have mattered a damn whether you ever lived or not?”

For a moment the unexpected question disconcerted Charley and he flushed.

“I don’t suppose it will.”

“Are you satisfied with that?”

“To tell you the truth, I’ve never thought about it. But if you ask me point-blank, I think I should be a fool if I weren’t. I could never have become a great artist. I talked it over with Father that summer after I came down, when we went fishing in Norway. He put it awfully nicely. Poor old dear, he was very anxious not to hurt my feelings, but I couldn’t help admitting that what he said was true. I’ve got a natural facility for doing things, I can paint a bit and write a bit and play a bit, perhaps I might have had a chance if I’d only been able to do one thing; but it was only a facility. Father was quite right when he said that wasn’t enough, and I think he was right too when he said it was better to be a pretty good business man than a second-rate artist. After all, it’s a bit of luck for me that old Sibert Mason married the cook and started growing vegetables on a bit of land that the growth of London turned into a valuable property. Don’t you think it’s enough if I do my duty in that state of life in which providence, or chance, if you like, has placed me?”

Simon gave him a smile more indulgent than any that had tortured his features that evening.

“I dare say, Charley. But not for me. I would sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.”

Charley looked at him calmly.

“You see, Simon, I have a happy nature and you haven’t.”

Simon chuckled.

“We must see if we can’t change that. Let’s stroll along. I’ll take you to the Sérail.”