Christmas Holiday (11 page)

“The place looks terribly frowsy,” he said. “D’you think it would be very nice to lunch in all this mess?”

“What does it matter?” she answered, with the first laugh he had heard from her. “But if it upsets your prim English sense of decorum, I’ll make the beds, or the maid can while I’m having a bath.”

She went into the bathroom and Charley telephoned for a waiter. He ordered some eggs, some meat, cheese and fruit, and a bottle of wine. Then he got hold of the maid. Though the room was heated there was a fireplace and he thought a fire would be cheerful. While the maid was getting the logs he dressed himself, and then, when she got busy setting things to rights, he sat down and looked at the grim courtyard. He thought disconsolately of the jolly party at the Terry-Masons’. They would be having a glass of sherry now before sitting down to their Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding, and they would all be very gay, pleased with their Christmas presents, noisy and jolly. After a while Lydia came back. She had no make-up on her face, but she had combed her hair neatly, the swelling of her eyelids had gone down, and she looked young and pretty; but her prettiness was not the sort that excites carnal desires and Charley, though naturally
susceptible, saw her come in without a flutter of his pulse.

“Oh, you’ve dressed,” she said. “Then I can keep on your dressing-gown, can’t I? Let me have your slippers. I shall float about in them, but it doesn’t matter.”

The dressing-gown had been a birthday present from his mother, and it was of blue patterned silk; it was much too long for her, but she arranged herself in it so that it was not unbecoming. She was glad to see the fire and sat down in the chair he had drawn up for her. She smoked a cigarette. What seemed to him strange was that she took the situation as though there were nothing strange in it. She was as casual in her behaviour as though she had known him all her life; if anything more was needed to banish any ideas he might have cherished about her, nothing could have been more efficacious than the impression he so clearly got from her that she had put out of her mind for good and all the possibility of his wanting to go to bed with her. He was surprised to see with what good appetite she ate. He had a notion after what she had told him the night before that she was too distraught to eat but sparingly, and it was a shock to his romantic sensibility to see that she ate as much as he did and with obvious satisfaction.

They were drinking their coffee when the telephone rang. It was Simon.

“Charley? Would you like to come round and have a talk?”

“I’m afraid I can’t just now.”

“Why not?” Simon asked sharply.

It was characteristic of him to think that everyone
should be ready to drop whatever he was doing if he wanted him. However little something mattered to him, if he had a whim for it and he was crossed, it immediately assumed consequence.

“Lydia’s here.”

“Who the devil’s Lydia?”

Charley hesitated an instant.

“Well, Princess Olga.”

There was a pause and then Simon burst into a harsh laugh.

“Congratulations, old boy. I knew you’d click. Well, when you have a moment to spare for an old friend, let me know.”

He rang off. When Charley turned back to Lydia she was staring into the fire. Her impassive face gave no sign that she had heard the conversation. Charley pushed back the little table at which they had lunched and made himself as comfortable as he could in a shallow armchair. Lydia leaned over and put another log on the fire. There was a sort of intimacy in the action that did not displease Charley. She was settling herself down as a small dog turns round two or three times on a cushion and, having made a suitable hollow, curls up in it. They stayed in all the afternoon. The joyless light of the winter day gradually failed and they sat by the light of the wood-fire. In the rooms on the opposite side of the court lights were turned on here and there, and the pale, uncurtained windows had a false strange look like lighted windows in the stage-set of a street. But they were not more unreal than the position in which he found himself seemed to Charley, sitting in that
sordid bedroom, by the fitful blazing of the log fire, while that woman whom he did not know told him her terrible story. It seemed not to occur to her that he might be unwilling to listen. So far as he could tell she had no inkling that he might have anything else to do, nor that in baring her heart to him, in telling him her anguish, she was putting a burden on him that a stranger had no right to exact. Was it that she wanted his sympathy? He wasn’t even sure of that. She knew nothing about him and wanted to know nothing. He was only a convenience, and but for his sense of humour, he would have found her indifference exasperating. Towards evening she fell silent, and presently by her quiet breathing Charley knew she had fallen asleep. He got up from his chair, for he had sat in it so long that his limbs ached, and went to the window, on tiptoe so as not to wake her, and sitting down on a stool looked out into the courtyard. Now and again he saw someone pass behind the lighted windows; he saw an elderly woman watering a flower-pot; he saw a man in his shirtsleeves lying on his bed reading; he wondered who and what these people were. They looked like ordinary middle-class persons in modest circumstances, for after all the hotel was cheap and the quarter dowdy; but seen like that, through the windows, as though in a peep-show, they looked strangely unreal. Who could tell what people were really and what grim passions, what crimes, their commonplace aspect concealed? In some of the rooms the curtains were drawn and only a chink of light between them showed that there was anyone there. Some of the windows were black; they were not
empty, for the hotel was full, but their occupants were out. On what mysterious errands? Charley’s nerves were shaken and he had a sudden feeling of horror for all those unknown persons whose lives were so strange to him; below the smooth surface he seemed to sense something confused, dark, monstrous and terrible.

He pondered, his brow knit in concentration, the long, unhappy story to which he had listened all the afternoon. Lydia had gone back and forth, now telling him of her struggle to live when she was working for a pittance at a dressmaker’s and after that some incident of her poverty-stricken childhood in London; then more of those agonizing days that followed the murder, the terror of the arrest and the anguish of the trial. He had read detective stories, he had read the papers, he knew that crimes were committed, he knew that people lived in penury, but he had known it all, as it were from the outside; it gave him a strange, a frightening sensation to find himself thrown into personal contact with someone to whom horrible things had actually happened. He remembered suddenly, he did not know why, a picture of Manet’s of somebody’s execution—was it Maximilian’s?—by a shooting squad. He had always thought it a striking picture. Now it came to him as a shock to realize that it portrayed an incident that had occurred. The Emperor had in fact stood in that place, and as the soldiers levelled their rifles, it must have seemed incredible to him that he should stand there and in a moment cease to live.

And now that he knew Lydia, now that he had
listened to her last night and that day, now that he had eaten with her, and danced with her, now that for so many hours they had lived together in such close proximity, it seemed unbelievable that such things should have befallen her.

If ever anything looked like pure chance it was that Lydia and Robert Berger met at all. Through the friends she lived with, who worked in a Russian restaurant, Lydia sometimes got a ticket for a concert, and when she couldn’t and there was something she very much wanted to hear, she scraped together out of her weekly earnings enough to buy herself standing-room. This was her only extravagance and to go to a concert her only recreation. It was chiefly Russian music she liked. Listening to that she felt that somehow she was getting to the heart of the country she had never seen, but which drew her with a yearning that must ever remain unsatisfied. She knew nothing of Russia but what she had heard from the lips of her father and mother, from the conversation between Evgenia and Alexey when they talked of old times, and from the novels she had read. It was when she was listening to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov, to the racy and mordant compositions of Stravinsky, that the impressions she had thus gained gathered form and substance. Those wild melodies, those halting rhythms, in which there was something so alien from Europe, took her out of herself and her sordid existence and overwhelmed her with such a passion of love that happy, releasing tears flowed down her cheeks. But because nothing of what she saw with the mind’s eye had she
seen with a bodily eye, because it was a product of hearsay and a fevered imagination, she saw it in a strangely distorted fashion; she saw the Kremlin, with its gilt and star-sprinkled domes, the Red Square and the Kitai Gorod, as though they were the setting of a fairy tale; for her Prince Andrey and the charming Natasha still went their errands in the busy streets of Moscow, Dmitri Karamazov, after a wild night with the gipsies, still met the sweet Alyosha on the Mostbaretsk Bridge, the merchant Rogozhin dashed past in his sled with Nastasya Filippovna by his side, and the wan characters of Chekov’s stories drifted hither and yon at the breath of circumstance like dead leaves before the wind; the Summer Garden and the Nevsky Prospekt were magic names, and Anna Karenina still drove in her carriage, Vronsky elegant in his new uniform climbed the stairs of the great houses on the Fontanka Canal, and the misbegotten Raskolnikov walked the Liteiny. In the passion and nostalgia of that music, with Turgeniev at the back of her mind, she saw the spacious, dilapidated country houses where they talked through the scented night, and the marshes, pale in the windless dawn, where they shot the wild duck; with Gorki, the wretched villages where they drank furiously, loved brutally and killed; the turbid flow of the Volga, the interminable steppes of the Caucasus, and the enchanting garish Crimea. Filled with longing, filled with regret for a life that had passed for ever, homesick for a home she had never known, a stranger in a hostile world, she felt at that moment one with the great, mysterious country. Even though she spoke its
language haltingly, she was Russian, and she loved her native land; at such moments she felt that there was where after all she belonged and she understood how it was that her father, despite the warnings, was obliged, even at the risk of death, to return to it.

It was at a concert, one where all the music was Russian, that she found herself standing next to a young man who, she noticed, now and then looked at her curiously. Once she happened to turn her eyes on him and was struck by the passionate absorption with which he seemed to be listening; his hands were clasped and his mouth slightly open as though he were out of breath. He was rapt in ecstasy. He had clean-cut features and looked well-bred. Lydia gave him but a passing glance and once more returned to the music and the crowding dreams it awoke in her. She too was carried away and she was hardly aware that a little sob broke from her lips. She was startled when she felt a small, soft hand take hers and give it a slight pressure. She quickly drew her hand away. The piece was the last before the interval and when it ended the young man turned to her. He had lovely eyes, gray under bushy eyebrows, and they were peculiarly gentle.

“You’re crying, Mademoiselle.”

She had thought he might be Russian like herself, but his accent was purely French. She understood that that quick pressure of her hand was one of instinctive sympathy, and was touched by it.

“Not because I am unhappy,” she answered, with a faint smile.

He smiled back and his smile was charming.

“I know. This Russian music, it’s strangely thrilling and yet it tears one’s heart to pieces.”

“But you’re French. What can it mean to you?”

“Yes. I’m French. I don’t know what it means to me. It’s the only music I want to listen to. It is power and passion, blood and destruction. It makes every nerve in my body tingle.” He gave a little laugh at himself. “Sometimes when I listen to it I feel there is nothing that man is capable of that I cannot do.”

She did not answer. It was singular that the same music could say such different things to different people. To her the music they had just heard spoke of the tragedy of human destiny, the futility of striving against fate, and the joy, the peace of humility and resignation.

“Are you coming to next week’s concert?” he asked then. “That’s to be all Russian too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

He was very young, he could be no older than herself, and there was an ingenuousness in him that made it impossible for her to answer too stiffly a question which in a stranger was indiscreet. There was something in his manner that made her sure he was not trying to pick her up. She smiled.

“I’m not a millionaire. They’re rare now, you know, the Russians who are.”

“I know some of the people who are running these concerts. I have a pass that admits two. If you like to meet me next Sunday in the doorway, you can come in on it.”

“I don’t think I could quite do that.”

“Do you think it would be compromising?” he smiled. “The crowd would surely be a sufficient chaperon.”

“I work in a dressmaker’s shop. It would be hard to compromise me. I don’t know that I can put myself under an obligation to a total stranger.”

“I am sure you are a very well-brought-up young lady, but you should not have unreasonable prejudices.”

She did not want to argue the point.

“Well, we’ll see. In any case I thank you for the suggestion.”

They talked of other things till the conductor once more raised his baton. At the end of the concert he turned to say good-bye to her.

“Till next Sunday then?” he said.

“We’ll see. Don’t wait for me.”

They lost one another in the crowd that thronged towards the exits. During the next week she thought from time to time of the good-looking young man with the large gray eyes. She thought of him with pleasure. She had not arrived at her age without having had to resist now and then the advances of men. Both Alexey and his son the gigolo had made a pass at her, but she had not found it difficult to deal with them. A smart box on the ear had made the lachrymose drunkard understand that there was nothing doing, and the boy she had kept quiet by a judicious mingling of ridicule and plain speech. Often enough men had tried to pick her up in the street, but she was always too tired and often too hungry to be tempted by their advances; it caused
her a grim amusement to reflect that the offer of a square meal would have tempted her much more than the offer of a loving heart. She had felt, with her woman’s instinct, that the young man of the concert was not quite like that. Doubtless, like any other youth of his age, he would not miss an opportunity for a bit of fun if he could get it, but it was not for the sake of that that he had offered to take her to the concert on Sunday. She had no intention of going, but she was touched that he had asked her. There was something very nice about him, something ingenuous and frank. She felt that she could trust him. She looked at the programme. They were giving the Symphonie Pathétique, she didn’t much care about that, Tchaikovsky was too Europeanized for her taste, but they were giving also the
Sacre du Printemps
and Borodin’s string quartet. She wondered whether the young man had really meant what he said. It might very well be that his invitation had been issued on the spur of the moment and in half an hour completely forgotten. When Sunday came she had half a mind to go and see, she did very much want to hear the concert, and she had not a penny more in her pocket than she needed for her Metro and her lunches during the week, she had had to give everything else to Evgenia to provide the household with food; if he was not there no harm would have been done, and if he was and really had a pass for two, well, it would cost him nothing and committed her to nothing.