I moved out of the ill-omened studio on the rue Daguerre and Daphne and I lived together happily for almost two weeks, encouraging each other to work.
One evening, however, I came back to the studio and found a note in her square schoolgirlish handwriting: she had gone to meet Angela’s boat at Marseilles. ‘Leave your traps here as long as you wish,’ she had added tactfully.
The next day I went to the Dôme to find somewhere else to live. Paris is not a place where you find an apartment or studio except by nosing around privately; nothing is offered publicly except to the rich and the unwary—and then at high rates. Everything there is done by friendship and favour, and while this is a delightful and primitive way of doing business, there are times when it is frustrating. It is then one discovers the French people are not, as is generally believed, exclusively interested in money, and that their real passion, as an essentially feminine people, is to confer favours, to indulge their egoism and feeling of superiority to the rest of the world by acts of condescension and grace.
On this occasion I could find no condescending or gracious French citizen to solve my problem; it was only early autumn and tourists, laden with dollars, still filled the city. I sat in the Falstaff Bar and meditated on the real cause of the housing situation: there were simply too many people in the world.
After a while I saw I was being watched by a woman wearing a long ragged cloak and sitting alone at the bar. It was some time before I recognized Mrs Quayle in this disguise. I decided she must be slumming, but when she gave me her little secretive smile I thought it safe to bow and join her.
‘Oh what can ail thee, man-at-arms?’ she whispered. ‘Alone and palelee loitering? You have acquired a beautiful tan, as well as a most Birrhonic melancholy since we last met—when was it?’
‘Last July 14th.’
‘Then let us meet again. In the little café at the corner of the rue Delambre in ten minutes. I shall be in the billiard-room at the back.’
I nodded, breathing in the expensive musky perfume that she still diffused like a crater, and went back to my table. A few minutes later she left without looking in my direction.
She was waiting in the billiard-room, a steaming cup before her, her cloak pulled up to her nose.
‘You are alone?’ she said.
‘Quite alone.’
‘What about all your mistresses?’
‘Gone, all gone.’
‘You haven’t even shaved today.’
‘Nor the day before.’
‘What will you have to drink? You are rather a sot, I seem to remember. I am having a gin with beef broth. Let me offer you one.’
‘Could I have a brandy instead?’
‘No. Take a sip of this and see if you don’t like it.’
‘Dry gin, I didn’t know they had it in this kind of place.’
‘They haven’t. I have my flask. Waiter, another bouillon.’
When it arrived she filled the cup to the brim from a leather-covered hunting-flask which she carried on a shoulder-strap under her cloak.
‘Madame,’ said the waiter crossly, ‘this is not allowed.’
‘I entreat you,’ she said, tucking a fifty-franc note under her saucer. He walked away smiling.
‘What a wonderful thing it is to have money,’ she said, setting down her cup. ‘I have such a lot of it. And I don’t imagine you have any at all at the moment. In fact you smell of poverty just now. My senses in these matters are infallible.’
‘They are indeed, Mrs Quayle.’
‘Call me Honour.’
‘Is that really your first name?’
‘Certainly.’
‘It’s lovely. Do you mind my asking why you’re dressed in this extraordinary manner?’
‘It amuses me, as it did Haroun-al-Raschid.’
‘But he always took his vizier and sword-bearer along with him in case of emergency.’
‘A puseellanimous Oriental. I’m frightened of nothing.’
‘Good for you. Have you had any adventures yet?’
‘I am having one now.’ Her eyes unhooded for an instant. I remembered the look she had given me at our first meeting—the fixed, mindless stare of a predatory bird. Before I even tried to meet it her blued eyelids dropped again. ‘Would you like another cup of gin soup?’
‘Very much, thank you, Mrs Quayle.’
‘Honour, please.’
When we left the café I was exhilarated with gin. We walked back to the Place Edgar-Quinet, where she flagged a taxi and gave her address in the rue Galilée.
The livingroom of her apartment, which I barely remembered, was large and sombrely furnished, with many photographs framed in silver and leather.
‘Let us have just one more cup,’ she said.
She brought two cups of cold consommé mixed with gin. She had changed to a knee-length dressing-gown of black suede; her legs and feet were bare. I tried to take her in my arms. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never kiss me. Go into the bedroom.’
Her bedroom was small and dim. It seemed to be completely done in dark leather—walls, furniture, cushions and curtains—and had the smell of a saddler’s shop. The low wide bed was covered with a slippery skin of either kid or calf. Mrs Quayle slipped out of her dressing-gown.
‘You must let my man drive you back to Montparnasse,’ she said a few hours later. ‘The car is ready at any time.’
I said I would rather take the bus. She looked at me with a flicker of genuine affection. ‘Really, I do like you tremenjously,’ she said. ‘And I see you are depressed. I have been very bed-selfish. Try and forgive me. We will see each other again?’
‘Whenever you wish.’
We shook hands. I was sure she cared nothing for me and I would never see her again. I stood on the landing outside her door for a few moments, feeling faint with dejection and loneliness. I pressed the elevator button and waited for a while until I noticed the wrought-iron door carried a little porcelain plaque marked for ascent only. Walking down the stairs I considered the symbolism: so neat, so trite, so literary, so full of premonitions of disaster. I thought of the hero of Daudet’s Sapho, the young man who carries his fatal mistress up four flights of stairs for their first assignation, arriving at the top completely winded. My own situation, though in one sense reversed, was just the same. I was hopelessly in love.
It’s quite simple, I told myself. You’ll get over it in a week or so. It won’t be too hard; you won’t see her again, you’ll be looking for a place to live, and you’ve got financial problems too. On top of that, you’ve got a book to write. It’s just a matter of keeping busy. Try to forget her; she’s a selfish, spoiled, perverse woman who would bring you nothing but misery. How in the name of sanity did you fall in love with her anyway?
I wandered down the Champs-Elysées, hardly knowing where I was going. The air was already charged with the first dusty violet colours of evening; automobiles were honking like wild geese; the terraces of the fashionable cafés were filling up with the aperitif crowd of stout men and smart women.
The trouble, I thought, is that my love for her is really pure, the first pure love I’ve ever felt for a woman—if I exclude a little girl with ringlets whom I loved in kindergarten: why did I love her? Perhaps because she used to kick my shins under the table where we used to cut out coloured paper. Why do I love Mrs Quayle? Because she has really done the same thing. But still it doesn’t make sense. In the first place, she isn’t my type at all. Or isn’t that the very reason? Don’t I love her because she is incapable of loving me?
I sat down on one of the benches in the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées. I stayed there for a long time, hearing the traffic going by, trying to gather myself together. Don’t lose your head, I kept thinking; all you have to do is not see her again. Try to think how silly and greedy she is.
It was no use. The thought of kissing her was already an obsession; yet I knew that even a kiss would solve nothing. I desired her whole soul, her personality, I wanted her to love me, to tell me I was the only man. I bent over, my head in my hands, rocking from side to side, thinking, So this is love, it’s caught up with me at last. I thought I was immune, and I’m not.
It was growing dark when I got up and walked towards the Tuileries. Once in the shade of the gardens themselves I felt protected. I remember passing the bust of Perrault with his circlet of dancing children and then threading the dark alleys of chestnuts and plane-trees. At last I was out in the open, among the statues of Coysevox and Coustou, with the grandiose bulk of the Louvre and the arch of Napoleon in sight.
O soul of Théophile Gautier, I thought, come to my help tonight—you who knew the hopelessness of love and gave yourself to the beauty of forms in good season. O Parnassian gentleman, holding your massive head aloft among the encroaching waves of pimps and arrivistes—you great and honest man, incapable of baseness, you who loved the Tuileries because their symmetry was the shadow of your own devotion to purity, tell me how to overcome my passion for Mrs Quayle!
There was no reply, for Gautier no longer haunts the Tuileries.
I kept on, crossed the river by the Pont du Carrousel and went up the rue des Saints-Péres; then, almost dropping with weariness, I took the bus at Sévres-Babylone back to the rue Broca. A letter from my father was waiting for me.
‘Once again [he wrote] I wish to impress on you my disapproval of your project of a career as a writer, and must now urge in the strongest possible terms the advisability of your returning home. You are of course quite free to remain in Europe if you choose, but in justice to yourself I have decided to discontinue your allowance of $50.00 a month as of this date. This decision has little or no connection with the fact that the Extract from your so-called “Autobiography” in some magazine called This Quarter was recently brought to my attention by Colonel Birdlime of the Department of Extramural Affairs, although your remarks about my friend Sir Arthur Currie are in the worst possible taste. Accordingly I enclose my cheque in the amount of One Hundred and Fifty Dollars to cover the cost of your passage to Montreal by the most economical means.’
This seemed to be what the religious writers of the last century had called a sign, a leading from above. At one stroke I could now solve all my problems of money, housing and infatuation: I could simply duck them all and get on the boat.
I knew this was the wisest course of action, the properest and most prudent. I could always salve my conscience by telling myself it had been forced on me. The great difficulty was, I did not want to go back home. I also felt, in some obscure way, I ought not to; and on top of this I knew if I ran away from Mrs Quayle I would regret it for the rest of my life. On so many counts, therefore, returning was a simple capitulation, a cowardly withdrawal, an admission of defeat.
The next evening Schooner and I sat at the little tabac on the boulevard du Montparnasse and turned the matter over carefully. I said nothing about Mrs Quayle. He advised me to go back. ‘In the first place,’ he said, ‘without any money at all you won’t be a free agent. A civilized man must be able to divide his energies between three pursuits—society, art, and sex. This leaves no time for gainful occupation, and such occupation in turn leaves insufficient time for any of the basic activities I have mentioned. In the second place you were, I believe, gently raised—if you will pardon the expression—and you can’t live like a bum any more than I can. In fact this is where we are badly handicapped in comparison with so many of our friends who, coming from sturdy mid-European peasant or ghetto stock, find no difficulty in producing their deathless art while living on a slice of bread and an onion. In the third place, you may not have heard of it, but there has been a resounding stock-market crash in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, and it really looks as if the party is over; anyway, everyone is going home.’
‘I feel for me the party is just beginning.’
‘At your age it’s only natural. But the fact is, you arrived a little late.’
‘I came as soon as I could.’
‘And very wisely, too. You have brought a fresh vision to bear on a dying epoch. But you can’t reanimate it all by yourself, just by looking at it. The expatriate way of life is grinding to a close. The twilight of the gods is drawing in; the international bankers are pulling the portiéres over the sky, or rather they are rolling down their iron shutters. No more credit, the game is over, the world must go back to work.’
These metaphors were disturbing. But I was unwilling to admit their validity. I was young and in love.
Just then Caridad appeared; she agreed with Schooner. ‘It will be sad without you, but it would be more sad to see you around looking hungry.’ She fixed me with a swift look. ‘I suppose there is no chance of you finding a rich woman to keep you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Would you have dinner with me for a change? I am rich tonight.’
Schooner excused himself, and Caridad and I went to Chez Salto where she plunged gracefully into a mound of spaghetti. Emerging after a while, she looked at me gravely. ‘You have a horrible problem which you are hiding,’ she said. ‘Do not deny it. I know, because I am full of the female intuition of my ancestors, who were gypsies. So I ask myself, “What is a young man’s greatest problem?” and I answer “It is love, of course.”’
I admitted I was in love.
‘And this is the true reason why you don’t want to go back home. Of course. I guessed it. Now we are probing the wound. Is your love quite hopeless? Have you no chance of winning her? In such a case you must go back as fast as possible and try to forget her in the great spaces of your homeland. Or perhaps you have won her already?’
‘We have been to bed together, yes.’
She attacked the gâteau maison with a thoughtful air. ‘I see. Is she rich?’
‘I don’t think I’d better say.’
‘I know who she is now. Oh, how sorry I am for you! How could you fall in love with her? She is foolish, affected, neurotic. She sleeps with fifty men every year, this little divorcée from Boston. And she smells like an Asiatic bazaar. How awful, to fall in love with a miserable mangeuse d’hommes. You have made a grave mistake. Tell me, how did it happen? What is her attraction? Is it the glamour of her riches?’
‘No.’
‘Then you were merely ripe for the slaughter. What a pity. Have some more wine.’
‘What shall I do?’
‘I am not sure. Advice is not much use in these matters. Let us get a little drunk first and then you will come home with me. You are looking exhausted, and in any case you must not be alone in your present mood. You might call on this woman.’
She had read my mind. I had in fact meant to telephone Mrs Quayle.
We sat in the Select for an hour, drinking brandy and talking about love. Apart from displaying a certain prurient curiosity about the physical details of my experience with Mrs Quayle, Caridad was serious and sympathetic.
‘But,’ she said, ‘I do not think there is any hope for you. In love, as Proust has demonstrated in several thousand pages, there is only the lover and the beloved, and the former is always wrong; that little tapette knew more about it than Voltaire, Casanova or Stendhal. You should realize it is not this American woman you love—it is her imago, which is in turn only an imaginative projection or radiation of your own other self. You are plagued by your double identity, you wish to adore your passive self, at the same time as you wish to be rejected by it, for reasons which are your own business. Well, you have chosen to burn your incense before this silly little nymphomaniac. You are running headlong to your own destruction—it’s a kind of game your fancy is playing. This game can have serious consequences to your health.’
‘You make it sound so reasonable. But all I can think of is her mouth, which I feel I must kiss or else go mad.’
‘Idiot. Do you think it would end there? You could kiss her all over, it would make no difference. It would be like a bee trying to climb up a window, either to get in or get out.’
We went to the rue Delambre. Her place was just the same as when Graeme and Stanley and I had shared it that spring. The sentimental associations, however, meant nothing to me now. I could think of nothing but Mrs Quayle.
I got into bed and Caridad came to me in the flickering yellow light of the courtyard lamp. Her red hair poured down her back. We embraced long, silently, and without passion. This was the first time in my life I had declined a woman’s body. It was lucky I did so, for two days later I found I had acquired a venereal disease.