by Jean Rhys
And a beastly feeling too – let me tell you.
So damned well I knew that I could never be poor again with courage or dignity.
I did a little sum; translated what we were spending into francs – into pounds – I was appalled. (When we first arrived in Vienna the crown was thirteen to the franc – at that time it was about sixty.)
As soon as I could I attacked Pierre.
First he laughed, then he grew vexed.
Frances, I tell you it’s all right. How much am I making? A lot.
How much exactly? Can’t say. How? You won’t understand.
Don’t be frightened, it – brings bad luck. You’ll stop my luck.
I shut up. I know so well that presentiments, fears, are unlucky.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Pierre, ‘soon I will pull it quite off and we will be rich, rich.’
We dined in a little corner of the restaurant.
At the same table a few days before we came, a Russian girl twenty-four years of age had shot herself.
With her last money she had a decent meal and then bang! Out –
And I made up my mind that if ever it came to it I should do it too.
Not to be poor again. No and No and No.
So darned easy to plan that – and always at the last moment – one is afraid. Or cheats oneself with hope.
I can still do this and this. I can still clutch at that or that.
So-and-So will help me.
How you fight, cleverly and well at first, then more wildly – then hysterically.
I can’t go down, I won’t go down. Help me, help me!
Steady – I must be clever. So-and-So will help.
But So-and-So smiles a worldly smile.
You get nervous. He doesn’t understand, I’ll make him –
But So-and-So’s eyes grow cold. You plead.
Can’t you help me, won’t you, please? It’s like this and this –
So-and-So becomes uncomfortable; obstinate.
No good.
I mustn’t cry, I won’t cry.
And that time you don’t. You manage to keep your head up, a smile on your face.
So-and-So is vastly relieved. So relieved that he offers at once the little help that is a mockery, and the consoling compliment.
In the taxi still you don’t cry.
You’ve thought of someone else.
But at the fifth or sixth disappointment you cry more easily.
After the tenth you give it up. You are broken – no nerves left.
And every second-rate fool can have their cheap little triumph over you – judge you with their little middle-class judgement.
Can’t do anything for them. No good.
C’est rien – c’est une femme qui se noie!
But two years, three years afterwards. Salut to you, little Russian girl, who had pluck enough and knowledge of the world enough, to finish when your good time was over.
The day before we left Vienna for Budapest was thundery and colder.
I’d spent nearly two hours in a massage place the Russian girl had told me of.
The Russian girl was introduced to me to replace Tillie. She had two advantages: a husband, and a slight knowledge of French.
We’d sat up night after night in the Radetzky bar. (Pierre always gathered swarms of people round him.) The most amusing of the party being an old lady over seventy who wore a bright yellow wig. She’d been an actress and still had heaps of temperament left.
There she sat night after night, drinking punch and singing about Liebe and Frauen with the best.
I came out of the shop and walked down the strasse – face like a doll’s – not a line, not a shadow, eyes nicer than a doll’s. Hadn’t I had stuff dropped in to make the pupils big and black?
Highly pleased with everything I was that afternoon – with the massage place, with the shortness of my frock, with life in general.
Abruptly the reaction came when I sat down to dinner. I was alone that evening – the presentiment, the black mood, in full swing.
A gentleman with a toothpick gazed fondly at me (in the intervals of serious excavating work), I glued my eyes on my plate.
Oh, abomination of desolation, to sit for two hours being massaged, to stand for hours choosing a dress. All to delight the eyes of the gentleman with the toothpick.
(Who finding me unresponsive has already turned his attention elsewhere.)
I hate him worse than ever.
Franzi is in the hall. The Herr has told him to bring the car and take me for a drive.
Nice Franzi.
I climb in – go quick, Franzi. Schnell – eine andere platz neit Prater neit weg zum Baden – neit Weiner Wald.
This is my German after two years! I mean go fast. Go to a new place, not the Prater, not the way to Baden –
Yes, that night was the last frenzied effort of my guardian angel, poor creature. I’ve never seen so clearly all my faults and failures and utter futility. I’ve never had so strong a wish to pack my trunks and clear.
Clear off – different life, different people.
Work.
Go to England – be quite different.
Even clearly and coldly the knowledge that I was not being sincere.
That I didn’t want to work.
Or wear ugly clothes.
That for ten years I’d lived like that – and that except for a miracle, I couldn’t change.
‘Don’t want to change’, defiantly.
I’ve compensations.
Oh, yes, compensations – moments.
No one has more.
‘Liar, Liar,’ shrieked the angel, ‘pack your trunks and clear.’ Poor angel – it was hopeless. You hadn’t a chance in that lovely night of Vienne.
Especially as in the midst of it came a terrific bump.
In his zeal to find an andere weg Franzi had taken me along a road that hadn’t been repaired since the year dot. We’d gone right over a stone, so big that I jumped, not being solid, a good three feet into the air. Fell back luckily into the car.
Franzi has stopped and looks behind frightened. I tell him to go home.
It’s not my fault.
Men have spoilt me – always disdaining my mind and concentrating on my body. Women have spoilt me with their senseless cruelties and stupidities. Can I help it if I’ve used my only weapon?
Yes, my only one.
Lies everything else – lies –
Lord, how I hate most women here, their false smiles, their ferocious jealousies of each other, their cunning – like animals.
They are animals, probably. Look at all the wise men who think so and have thought so.
Even Jesus Christ was kind but cold and advised having as little as possible to do with them.
Besides, if I went back to London –
I go back to what, to who?
How lonely I am – how lonely I am.
Tears.
Self-pity, says the little thing in my brain coldly, is the most ridiculous and futile of emotions. Go to bed, woman.
I creep in and am comforted. How I adore nice sheets; how good the pillow smells.
I’m awfully happy really – why did I suddenly get the blues?
Tomorrow I’ll see Budapest.
Ridiculous idea to go to London. What should I do in London –
Good-bye Vienna, the lilac, the lights looking down from Kahlenberg, the old lady with the yellow wig singing of Frauen.
Will I ever be like that old lady? And run to the massage shop because I have to prop up the failing structure? Possibly, probably.
Lovely Vienna. Never see you again.
Nice linen sheets.
Sleep.
Well, we all have our illusions. God knows it would be difficult to look in the glass without them.
I, that my life from seventeen to twenty-two is responsible for my damned weakness, and Simone that she has the prettiest legs in Paris. Good women that they’re not really spiteful, bad ones
that they’re not really growing older or the latest lover growing colder.
I can’t imagine winter in Budapest. Can’t imagine it anything else but hot summer.
Heat and a perpetual smell, an all-pervading smell – in the hotels, in the streets, on the river, even outside the town I still imagined I smelt it.
The Hungarians told us it used to be the cleanest city in Europe till the Bolsheviks made it dirty – the Bolsheviks and ‘the cursed, the horrible Roumanians’.
It was now being cleaned gradually – very gradually, I should say.
Haughton used to bark loudly (he did bark!) about the exact reasons why it had always been, and still was the most interesting city in Europe, with the exception of Petersburg before the war. ‘Les femmes ici ont du chien’ – that’s how the French officers explained the matter.
Anyway, I liked it – I liked it better than Vienna.
Haughton lived in the same hotel as we did. We took our meals together and every night we made up a party for the Orpheum or one of the dancing places. He generally brought along a bald Italian with kind brown eyes, a sailor, and a Polish woman and her husband.
He was in the Commission because he spoke Russian, German, French, Italian, even a little Hungarian. Marvellous person!
He had lived in Russia for years, tutor or something to one of the Grand Dukes, and I admired his taste in ladies. He liked them slim, frail, graceful, scented, vicious, painted, charming – and he was chic with them from first to last – un-English in fact, though he remained English to look at.
But sometimes he spoilt those perfect nights when we dined outside Buda with his incessant, not very clever cynicisms.
‘Ha, ha, ha! Good Lord! Yes. Damn pretty woman. What?’
When the tziganes were playing their maddest and saddest – he’d still go on happily barking . . .
Budapest looks theatrically lovely from a distance. I remember the moon like a white bird in the afternoon sky; the greyish-green trunks of sycamore trees, the appalling bumps in the road.
‘Not too fast, Franzi; don’t go too fast!’ . . .
Then back to the city and its vivid smells, the wail of tzigane orchestras, the little dancer of the Orpheum – what was her name? . . . Ilonka – nice name, sounds like a stone thrown into deep water. She would come smiling and silent – she could speak neither French nor German – to sit with us when her turn was over.
‘Awfully monotonous this tzigane stuff, what?’ Haughton would say, fidgeting.
It was, I suppose. It seemed to be endless variations and inversions of a single chord – tuneless, plaintive, melancholy; the wind over the plain, the hungry cry of the human heart and all the rest of it . . . Well, well . . .
There was a hard, elegant, little sofa in our room, covered with striped yellow silk – sky-blue cushions. I spent long afternoons lying on that sofa plunged in a placid dream of maternity.
I felt a calm sense of power lying in that dark, cool room, as though I could inevitably and certainly draw to myself all I had ever wished for in life – as though I were mysteriously irresistible, a magnet, a Femme Sacrée.
One can become absorbed . . . exalted . . . lost as it were, when one is going to have a baby, and one is extremely pleased about it.
One afternoon Pierre said: ‘If anyone comes here from the Allgemeine Verkehrsbank you must say that I’m not in and that you don’t know when I’ll be back.’
Someone called from the bank – a fat, short man, insisting, becoming rude in bad French. He would see Monsieur. He must see Monsieur. Madame could not say when Monsieur would be back. ‘Très bien – très bien.’ He would go to Monsieur’s office to make inquiries.
He departed. His back looked square, revengeful – catastrophic – that’s the word. I believe that looking at the man’s back I guessed everything, foresaw everything.
I attacked Pierre as soon as he came home. I mean questioned him – but he was so evasive that I turned it into an attack. Evasion has always irritated me.
‘Tell me, for Heaven’s sake, have you lost a lot of money, or something? You have. I know you have – you must tell me.’
He said: ‘My dear, let me alone, I’ll pull it off if you let me alone – but I don’t want to talk about it . . . Haughton has asked us to dine at the Ritz . . . Et qu’importent les jours pourvu que les nuits soient belles?’
He made a large and theatrical gesture.
I let him alone, weakly, I suppose. But one gets used to security and to thinking of one’s husband as a money-maker, a juggler, performing incredible and mysterious feats with yen, with lire, with francs and sterling . . .’ change on Zurich . . .
I let him alone – but I worried. I caught Haughton looking at me as if he were sorry for me . . . Sorry for me. Haughton!
Ten days after the man of the Bank had called, I went up to my bedroom at half-past six to change my frock and found Pierre sitting on the striped yellow sofa hunched up, staring at the revolver in his hand.
I always hated revolvers, little, vicious, black things. Just to look at a revolver or a gun gives me a pain deep down in my head; not because they’re dangerous – I don’t hate knives – but because the noise of a shot hurts my ears.
I said: ‘Oh, Pierre, put that thing away! How horribly unkind you are to frighten me!’
Stupid to cry at the very moment one should keep calm.
He was silent, rather surly.
Well, I dragged the truth out of him. He told me, moving one foot restlessly and looking rather like a schoolboy, that he had lost money – other people’s money – the Commission’s money – Ishima had let him down . . .
Then followed the complicated history of yens – of francs – of krönen. He interrupted himself to say: ‘You don’t understand a thing about money. What is the good of asking me to explain? I’m done, I tell you, tried everything . . . no good! I may be arrested any time now.’
I was calm, cool, overflowing with common sense. I believe people who are badly wounded must be like that before the wound begins to hurt . . . Now then, what is the best way to stop this bleeding? . . . Bandages . . . Impossible that this and no other is the shot that is going to finish one . . .
I sat on the sofa beside him and said: ‘Tell me how much you need to put yourself straight? I can understand that much at any rate.’
He told me, and there was a dead silence.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘Let me put a bullet in my head. You think I want to go to jail in Budapest? I haven’t a chance!’
I explained, still calmly and reasonably, that he must not kill himself and leave me alone – that I was frightened – that I did not want to die – that somehow I would find the money to pay his debts.
All the time I was speaking he kept his eyes on the door as if he were watching for it to open suddenly and brutally. Then repeated as if I had not spoken: ‘I’m fichu . . . Go away and let me get out of it the only way I can . . . I’ve saved four thousand francs ready for you . . . And your rings . . . Haughton will help you . . . I’m fichu . . .’
I set my mouth: ‘You aren’t. Why can’t you be a man and fight?’
‘I won’t wait here to be arrested,’ he answered me sulkily, ‘they shan’t get me, they shan’t get me, I tell you.’
My plan of going to London to borrow money was already complete in my head. One thinks quickly sometimes.
‘Don’t let’s wait then. Pierre, you can’t do such a rotten thing as to leave me alone?’
‘Mon petit,’ he said, ‘I’m a damn coward or I would have finished it before. I tell you I’m right – I’m done. Save yourself . . . You can’t save me!’
He laughed with tears in his eyes. ‘My poor Francine, wait a bit . . .’
‘Let’s go, let’s get away,’ I said, ‘and shut up about killing yourself. If you kill yourself you know what will happen to me?’
We stared at each other.
‘You know damn well,’ I told him.
He dropped his e
yes and muttered: ‘All right – all right! . . . Only don’t forget I’ve warned you, I’ve told you. It’s going to be hell . . . You’re going to blame me one day for not getting out quick and leaving you to save yourself.’
He began to walk restlessly up and down the room.
We decided that we could leave early the next morning. Just to go off. Like that. We made plans – suddenly we were speaking in whispers . . .
We had dinner upstairs that night, I remember – paprika, canard sauvage, two bottles of Pommery.
‘Allons, Francine, cheer up! Au mauvais jeu il faut faire bonne mine.’
I’ve always loved him for these sudden, complete changes of mood. No Englishman could change so suddenly – so completely. I put out my hand, and as I touched him my courage, my calm, my insensibility left me and I felt a sort of vague and bewildered fright. Horrible to feel that henceforth and for ever one would live with the huge machine of law, order, respectability against one. Horrible to be certain that one was not strong enough to fight it.
‘Au mauvais jeu bonne mine’ . . . A good poker face, don’t they call it? . . . The quality of not getting rattled when anything goes wrong . . .
When we opened our second bottle of Pommery I had become comfortingly convinced that I was predestined – a feather on the sea of fate and all the rest. And what was the use of worrying – anyway? . . .
As I was drinking a fourth glass, hoping to increase this comforting feeling of irresponsibility, Haughton knocked and came in to see us.
There was a moment that night when I nearly confided in Haughton.
Pierre had gone away to telephone, to see the chauffeur, and I’ve always liked those big men with rather hard blue eyes. I trust them instinctively – and probably wrongly. I opened my mouth to say: ‘Haughton, this and that is the matter . . . I’m frightened to death, really . . . What am I to do?’
And as I was hesitating Pierre came back.
At one o’clock we began to pack, making as little noise as possible. We decided to take only one trunk.
I remember the table covered with cigarette ends and liqueur glasses, the two empty bottles of champagne, and the little yellow sofa looking rather astonished and disapproving.
At half-past six in the morning we left the hotel.