by Jean Rhys
Verhausen’s studio was in the real Latin Quarter which lies to the north of the Montparnasse district and is shabbier and not cosmopolitan yet. It was an ancient, narrow street of uneven houses, a dirty, beautiful street, full of mauve shadows. A policeman stood limply near the house, his expression that of contemplative stupefaction: a yellow dog lay stretched philosophically on the cobblestones of the roadway. The concierge said without interest that Monsieur Verhausen’s studio was on the quatrième à droite. I toiled upwards.
I knocked three times. There was a subdued rustling within . . . A fourth time: as loudly as I could. The door opened a little and Mr Verhausen’s head appeared in the opening. I read suspicion in his eyes and I smiled as disarmingly as I could. I said something about Mr Van Hoyt – his own kind invitation, my great pleasure.
Verhausen continued to scrutinize me through huge spectacles: then he smiled with a sudden irradiation, stood away from the door and bowing deeply, invited me to enter. The room was big, all its walls encumbered on the floor with unframed canvases, all turned with their backs to the wall. It was very much cleaner than I had expected: quite clean and even dustless. On a table was spread a white cloth and there were blue cups and saucers and a plate of gingerbread cut into slices and thickly buttered. Mr Verhausen rubbed his hands and said with a pleased, childlike expression and in astonishingly good English that he had prepared an English tea that was quite ready because he had expected me sooner.
We sat on straight-backed chairs and sipped solemnly.
Mr Verhausen looked exactly as he had looked in the café, his blue eyes behind the spectacles at once naïve and wise, his waistcoat spotted with reminiscences of many meals.
But a delightful personality – comfortable and comforting. His long, curved pipes hung in a row on the wall; they made the whole room look Dutchly homely. We discussed Montparnasse with gravity.
He said suddenly: ‘Now you have drunk your second cup of tea you shall see my pictures. Two cups of tea all English must have before they contemplate works of art.’
He had jumped up with a lightness surprising in a bulky man and with similar alacrity drew an easel near a window and proceeded to put pictures on it without any comment. They were successive outbursts of colour: it took me a little time to get used to them. I imagine that they were mostly, but not all, impressionist. But what fascinated me at first was his way of touching the canvases – his loving, careful hands.
After a time he seemed to forget that I was there and looked at them himself, anxiously and critically, his head on one side, frowning and muttering to himself in Flemish. A landscape pleased me here and there: they were mostly rough and brilliant. But the heads were very minutely painted and . . . Dutch! A woman stepping into a tub of water under a shaft of light had her skin turned to gold.
Then he produced a larger canvas, changed the position of the easel and turned to me with a little grunt. I said slowly: ‘I think that is a great picture. Great art!’
. . . A girl seated on a sofa in a room with many mirrors held a glass of green liqueur. Dark-eyed, heavy-faced, with big, sturdy peasant’s limbs, she was entirely destitute of lightness or grace.
But all the poisonous charm of the life beyond the pale was in her pose, and in her smouldering eyes – all its deadly bitterness and fatigue in her fixed smile.
He received my compliments with pleasure, but with the quite superficial pleasure of the artist who is supremely indifferent to the opinion that other people may have about his work. And, just as I was telling him that the picture reminded me of a portrait of Manet’s, the original came in from outside, carrying a string bag full of green groceries. Mr Verhausen started a little when he saw her and rubbed his hands again – apologetically this time. He said: ‘This, Madame, is my little Marthe. Mademoiselle Marthe Baesen.’
She greeted me with a reserve and glanced at the picture on the easel with an inscrutable face. I said to her: ‘I have been admiring Mr Verhausen’s work.’
She said: ‘Yes, Madame?’ with the inflexion of a question and left the room with her string bag.
The old man said to me: ‘Marthe speaks no English and French very badly. She is a true Fleming. Besides, she is not used to visitors.’
There was a feeling of antagonism in the studio now. Mr Verhausen fidgeted and sighed restlessly. I said, rather with hesitation: ‘Mr Verhausen, is it true that you object to exhibiting and to selling your pictures?’
He looked at me over his spectacles, and the suspicious look, the look of an old Jew when counting his money, came again into his eyes.
‘Object, Madame? I object to nothing. I am an artist. But I do not wish to sell my pictures. And, as I do not wish to sell them, exhibiting is useless. My pictures are precious to me. They are precious, most probably, to no one else.’
He chuckled and added with a glint of malice in his eyes: ‘When I am dead Marthe will try to sell them and not succeed, probably. I am forgotten now. Then she will burn them. She dislikes rubbish, the good Marthe.’
Marthe re-entered the room as he said this. Her face was unpowdered but nearly unwrinkled, her eyes were clear with the shrewd, limited expression of the careful housewife – the look of small horizons and quick, hard judgements. Without the flame his genius had seen in her and had fixed for ever, she was heavy, placid and uninteresting – at any rate to me.
She said, in bad French: ‘I have bought two artichokes for . . .’ I did not catch how many sous. He looked pleased and greedy.
In the street the yellow dog and the policeman had vanished. The café opposite the door had come alive and its gramophone informed the world that:
Souvent femme varie
Bien fol est qui s’y fie!
It was astonishing how the figure of the girl on the sofa stayed in my mind: it blended with the coming night, the scent of Paris and the hard blare of the gramophone. And I said to myself: ‘Is it possible that all that charm, such as it was, is gone?’
And then I remembered the way in which she had touched his cheek with her big hands. There was in that movement knowledge, and a certain sureness: as it were the ghost of a time when her business in life had been the consoling of men.
Trio
They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures.
The man was very black – coal black, with a thick silver ring on a finger of one hand. He wore a smart grey lounge suit, cut in at the waist, and his woolly hair was carefully brushed back and brilliantined. The woman was coffee-coloured and fat. She had on the native Martinique turban, making no pretension to fashion. Her bodice and skirt gaped apart and through the opening a coarse white cotton chemise peeped innocently forth . . . From the Antilles . . .
Between them was a girl, apparently about fifteen, but probably much younger. She sat very close to the man and every now and then would lay her head on his shoulder for a second . . . There was evidently much white blood in her veins: the face was charming.
She had exactly the movements of a very graceful kitten, and he, appreciative, would stop eating to kiss her . . . long, lingering kisses, and, after each one she would look round the room as if to gather up a tribute of glances of admiration and envy – a lovely, vicious little thing . . . From the Antilles, too. You cannot think what home-sickness descended over me . . .
The fuzzy, negress’ hair was exactly the right frame for her vulgar, impudent, startlingly alive little face: the lips were just thick enough to be voluptuous, the eyes with an expression half cunning, half intelligent. She wore a very short red frock and black, patent leather shoes. Her legs were bare. Suddenly she began to sing: F’en ai marre, to the huge delight of the coal black man who applauded vigorously.
As she grew more excited she jumped up, swung her slim hips violently, rolled her eyes, stamped her feet, lifted her skirt. Obviously the red dress was her only garment, obviously too she was
exquisite beneath it . . . supple, slender, a dancer from the Thousand and One Nights . . .
F’en ai m-a-r-r-e.
The fat, coffee-coloured woman looked on peacefully, then after a cautious glance at the patronne seated behind her counter:
‘Keep yourself quiet, Doudou,’ she said. ‘Keep yourself quiet.’ Then with a happy laugh:
Mais . . . ce qu’elle est cocasse, quand même! she said proudly.
It was because these were my compatriots that in that Montparnasse restaurant I remembered the Antilles.
Mixing Cocktails
The house in the hills was very new and very ugly, long and narrow, of unpainted wood, perched oddly on high posts, I think as a protection from wood ants. There were six rooms with a veranda that ran the whole length of the house . . . But when you went up there, there was always the same sensation of relief and coolness – in the ugly house with the beginnings of a rose garden, after an hour’s journey by boat and another hour and a half on horse-back, climbing slowly up . . .
On the veranda, upon a wooden table with four stout legs, stood an enormous brass telescope. With it you spied out the steamers passing: the French mail on its way to Guadeloupe, the Canadian, the Royal Mail, which should have been stately and was actually the shabbiest of the lot . . . Or an exciting stranger!
At night one gazed through it at the stars and pretended to be interested . . . ‘That’s Venus . . . Oh, is that Venus . . . And that’s the Southern Cross . . .’ An unloaded shotgun leant up in one corner; there were always plenty of straw rocking-chairs and a canvas hammock with many cushions.
From the veranda one looked down the green valley sloping to the sea, but from the other side of the house one could only see the mountains, lovely but melancholy as mountains always are to a child.
Lying in the hammock, swinging cautiously, for the ropes creaked, one dreamt . . . The morning dream was the best – very early, before the sun was properly up. The sea was then a very tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary, and on it were little white triangles. The fishing boats.
A very short dream, the morning dream – mostly about what one would do with the endless blue day. One would bathe in the pool: perhaps one would find treasure . . . Morgan’s Treasure. For who does not know that, just before he was captured and I think hung at Kingston, Jamaica, Morgan buried his treasure in the Dominican mountains . . . A wild place, Dominica. Savage and lost. Just the place for Morgan to hide his treasure in.
It was very difficult to look at the sea in the middle of the day. The light made it so flash and glitter: it was necessary to screw the eyes up tight before looking. Everything was still and languid, worshipping the sun.
The midday dream was languid too – vague, tinged with melancholy as one stared at the hard, blue, blue sky. It was sure to be interrupted by someone calling to one to come in out of the sun . . . One was not to sit in the sun. One had been told not to be in the sun . . . One would one day regret freckles.
So the late afternoon was the best time on the veranda, but it was spoiled, for all the rest were there . . .
So soon does one learn the bitter lesson that humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never. They must interfere, actively and grimly, between your thoughts and yourself – with the passionate wish to level up everything and everybody.
I am speaking to you; do you not hear? You must break yourself of your habit of never listening. You have such an absent-minded expression. Try not to look vague . . .
So rude!
The English aunt gazes and exclaims at intervals: ‘The colours . . . How exquisite! . . . Extraordinary that so few people should visit the West Indies . . . That sea . . . Could anything be more lovely?’
It is a purple sea with a sky to match it. The Caribbean. The deepest, the loveliest in the world . . .
Sleepily but tactfully, for she knows it delights my father, she admires the roses, the hibiscus, the humming birds. Then she starts to nod. She is always falling asleep, at the oddest moments. It is the unaccustomed heat.
I should like to laugh at her, but I am a well-behaved little girl . . . Too well-behaved . . . I long to be like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People, with their way of wantonly hurting and then accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous. All because a hurt and puzzled little girl has retired into her shell.
The afternoon dream is a materialistic one . . . It is of the days when one shall be plump and beautiful instead of pale and thin: perfectly behaved instead of awkward . . . When one will wear sweeping dresses and feathered hats and put gloves on with ease and delight . . . And of course, of one’s marriage: the dark moustache and perfectly creased trousers . . . Vague, that.
The veranda gets dark very quickly. The sun sets: at once night and the fireflies.
A warm, velvety, sweet-smelling night, but frightening and disturbing if one is alone in the hammock. Ann Twist, our cook, the old obeah woman has told me: ‘You all must’n look too much at de moon . . .’
If you fall asleep in the moonlight you are bewitched, it seems . . . the moon does bad things to you if it shines on you when you sleep. Repeated often . . .
So, shivering a little, I go into the room for the comfort of my father working out his chess problem from the Times Weekly Edition. Then comes my nightly duty mixing cocktails.
In spite of my absent-mindedness I mix cocktails very well and swizzle them better (our cocktails, in the West Indies, are drunk frothing, and the instrument with which one froths them is called a swizzle-stick) than anyone else in the house.
I measure out angostura and gin, feeling important and happy, with an uncanny intuition as to how strong I must make each separate drink.
Here then is something I can do . . . Action, they say, is more worthy than dreaming . . .
Again the Antilles
The editor of the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette lived in a tall, white house with green Venetian blinds which overlooked our garden. I used often to see him looking solemnly out of his windows and would gaze solemnly back, for I thought him a very awe-inspiring person.
He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and dark clothes always – not for him the frivolity of white linen even on the hottest day – a stout little man of a beautiful shade of coffee-colour, he was known throughout the Island as Papa Dom.
A born rebel, this editor: a firebrand. He hated the white people, not being quite white, and he despised the black ones, not being quite black . . . ‘Coloured’ we West Indians call the intermediate shades, and I used to think that being coloured embittered him.
He was against the Government, against the English, against the Island’s being a Crown Colony and the Town Board’s new system of drainage. He was also against the Mob, against the gay and easy morality of the negroes and ‘the hordes of priests and nuns that overrun our unhappy Island’, against the existence of the Anglican bishop and the Catholic bishop’s new palace.
He wrote seething articles against that palace which was then being built, partly by voluntary labour – until, one night his house was besieged by a large mob of the faithful, throwing stones and howling for his blood. He appeared on his veranda, frightened to death. In the next issue of his paper he wrote a long account of the ‘riot’: according to him it had been led by several well-known Magdalenes, then, as always, the most ardent supporters of Christianity.
After that, though, he let the Church severely alone, acknowledging that it was too strong for him.
I cannot imagine what started the quarrel between himself and Mr Hugh Musgrave.
Mr Hugh Musgrave I regarded as a dear, but peppery. Twenty years of the tropics and much indulgence in spices and cocktails does have that effect. He owned a big estate, just outside the town of Roseau, cultivated limes and sugar canes and employed a great deal of labour, but he was certainly neither ferocious nor tyrannical.
Suddenly, however, there was the feud in full s
wing.
There was in the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette a column given up to letters from readers and, in this column, writing under the pseudonyms of Pro Patria, Indiginant, Liberty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Papa Dom let himself go. He said what he thought about Mr Musgrave and Mr Musgrave replied: briefly and sternly as benefits an Englishman of the governing class . . . Still he replied.
It was most undignified, but the whole Island was hugely delighted. Never had the Herald had such a sale.
Then Mr Musgrave committed, according to Papa Dom, some specially atrocious act of tyranny. Perhaps he put a fence up where he should not have, or overpaid an unpopular overseer or supported the wrong party on the Town Board . . . At any rate Papa Dom wrote in the next issue of the paper this passionate and unforgettable letter:
‘It is a saddening and a dismal sight,’ it ended, ‘to contemplate the degeneracy of a stock. How far is such a man removed from the ideals of true gentility, from the beautiful description of a contemporary, possibly, though not certainly, the Marquis of Montrose, left us by Shakespeare, the divine poet and genius.
‘He was a very gentle, perfect knight . . .’
Mr Musgrave took his opportunity:
‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote
‘I never read your abominable paper. But my attention has been called to a scrurrilous letter about myself which you published last week. The lines quoted were written, not by Shakespeare but by Chaucer, though you cannot of course be expected to know that, and run
He never yet no vilonye had sayde
In al his lyf, unto no manner of wight –
He was a verray parfit, gentil knyght.
‘It is indeed a saddening and a dismal thing that the names of great Englishmen should be thus taken in vain by the ignorant of another race and colour.’
Mr Musgrave had really written ‘damn niggers’.