by Jean Rhys
Only four men pushed them down the stairs, but when they were out in the street it took more like fourteen, and all howling and booing. ‘Now, who are all these people?’ Mr Severn thought. Then someone hit him. The man who had hit him was exactly like the waiter who had changed the tablecloth. Mr Severn hit back as hard as he could and the waiter, if he was the waiter, staggered against the wall and toppled slowly to the ground. ‘I’ve knocked him down,’ Mr Severn thought. ‘Knocked him down!’
‘Tally-ho!’ he yelled in a high voice. ‘What price the tame grey mare?’
The waiter got up, hesitated, thought better of it, turned round and hit Maidie instead.
‘Shut up, you bloody basket,’ somebody said when she began to swear, and kicked her. Three men seized Mr Severn, ran him off the pavement and sprawled him in the middle of Wardour Street. He lay there, feeling sick, listening to Maidie. The lid was properly off there.
‘Yah!’ the crowd round her jeered. ‘Boo!’ Then it opened up, servile and respectful, to let two policemen pass.
‘You big blanks,’ Maidie yelled defiantly. ‘You something somethings. I wasn’t doing anything. That man knocked me down. How much does Johnson pay you every week for this?’
Mr Severn got up, still feeling very sick. He heard a voice: ‘That’s ’im. That’s the chap. That’s ’im what started everything.’ Two policemen took him by the arms and marched him along. Maidie, also between two policemen, walked in front, weeping. As they passed through Piccadilly Circus, empty and desolate, she wailed, ‘I’ve lost my shoe. I must stop and pick it up. I can’t walk without it.’
The older policeman seemed to want to force her on, but the younger one stopped, picked the shoe up and gave it to her with a grin.
‘What’s she want to cry for?’ Mr Severn thought. He shouted ‘Hoi, Maidie, cheer up. Cheer up, Maidie.’
‘None of that,’ one of his policemen said.
But when they arrived at the police station she had stopped crying, he was glad to see. She powdered her face and began to argue with the sergeant behind the desk.
‘You want to see a doctor, do you?’ the sergeant said.
‘I certainly do. It’s a disgrace, a perfect disgrace.’
‘And do you also want to see a doctor?’ the sergeant asked coldly polite, glancing at Mr Severn.
‘Why not?’ Mr Severn answered.
Maidie powdered her face again and shouted, ‘God save Ireland. To hell with all dirty sneaks and Comic Cuts and what have-yous.’
‘That was my father speaking,’ she said over her shoulder as she was led off.
As soon as Mr Severn was locked into a cell he lay down on the bunk and went to sleep. When they woke him to see the doctor he was cold sober.
‘What time is it?’ the doctor asked. With a clock over his head the old fool!
Mr Severn answered coldly, ‘A quarter past four.’
‘Walk straight ahead. Shut your eyes and stand on one leg,’ the doctor demanded, and the policeman watching this performance sneered vaguely, like schoolboys when the master baits an unpopular one.
When he got back to his cell Mr Severn could not sleep. He lay down, stared at the lavatory seat and thought of the black eye he would have in the morning. Words and meaningless phrases still whirled tormentingly round in his head.
He read the inscriptions on the grim walls. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out. B. Lewis.’ ‘Anne is a fine girl, one of the best, and I don’t care who knows it. (Signed) Charlie S.’ Somebody else had written up, ‘Lord save me; I perish’, and underneath, ‘SOS, SOS, SOS (signed) G.R.’
‘Appropriate,’ Mr Severn thought, took his pencil from his pocket, wrote, ‘SOS, SOS, SOS (Signed) N.S.,’ and dated it.
Then he lay down with his face to the wall and saw, on a level with his eyes, the words, ‘I died waiting.’
Sitting in the prison van before it started, he heard somebody whistling ‘The Londonderry Air’ and a girl talking and joking with the policemen. She had a deep, soft voice. The appropriate adjective came at once into his mind – a sexy voice.
‘Sex, sexy,’ he thought. ‘Ridiculous word! What a giveaway!’
‘What is wanted,’ he decided, ‘is a brand-new lot of words, words that will mean something. The only word that means anything now is death – and then it has to be my death. Your death doesn’t mean much.’
The girl said, ‘Ah, if I was a bird and had wings, I could fly away, couldn’t I?’
‘Might get shot as you went,’ one of the policemen answered.
‘This must be a dream,’ Mr Severn thought. He listened for Maidie’s voice, but there was not a sound of her. Then the van started.
It seemed a long way to Bow Street. As soon as they got out of the van he saw Maidie, looking as if she had spent the whole night in tears. She put her hand up to her hair apologetically.
‘They took my handbag away. It’s awful.’
‘I wish it had been Heather,’ Mr Severn thought. He tried to smile kindly.
‘It’ll soon be over now, we’ve only got to plead guilty.’
And it was over very quickly. The magistrate hardly looked at them, but for reasons of his own he fined them each thirty shillings, which entailed telephoning to a friend, getting the money sent by special messenger and an interminable wait.
It was half-past twelve when they were outside in Bow Street. Maidie stood hesitating, looking worse than ever in the yellowish, livid light. Mr Severn hailed a taxi and offered to take her home. It was the least he could do, he told himself. Also the most.
‘Oh, your poor eye!’ Maidie said. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not at all now. I feel astonishingly well. It must have been good whisky.’
She stared into the cracked mirror of her handbag.
‘And don’t I look terrible too? But it’s no use; I can’t do anything with my face when it’s as bad as this.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘I was feeling pretty bad on account of the way that chap knocked me down and kicked me, and afterwards on account of the way the doctor asked me my age. “This woman’s very drunk,” he said. But I wasn’t, was I? . . . Well, and when I got back into the cell, the first thing I saw was my own name written up. My Christ, it did give me a turn! Gladys Reilly – that’s my real name. Maidie Richards is only what I call myself. There it was staring me in the face. “Gladys Reilly, October 15th, 1934 . . .” Besides, I hate being locked up. Whenever I think of all these people they lock up for years I shiver all over.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Severn said, ‘so do I.’ I died waiting.
‘I’d rather die quick, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I couldn’t sleep and I kept on remembering the way the doctor said, “How old are you?” And all the policemen round were laughing, as if it was a joke. Why should it be such a joke. But they’re hard up for jokes, aren’t they? So when I got back I couldn’t stop crying. And when I woke up I hadn’t got my bag. The wardress lent me a comb. She wasn’t so bad. But I do feel fed up . . .
‘You know the room I was waiting in while you were telephoning for money?’ she said. ‘There was such a pretty girl there.’
‘Was there?’
‘Yes, a very dark girl. Rather like Dolores del Rio, only younger. But it isn’t the pretty ones who get on – oh no, on the contrary. For instance, this girl. She couldn’t have been prettier – lovely, she was. And she was dressed awfully nicely in a black coat and skirt and a lovely clean white blouse and a little white hat and lovely stockings and shoes. But she was frightened. She was so frightened that she was shaking all over. You saw somehow that she wasn’t going to last it out. No, it isn’t being pretty that does it . . . And there was another one, with great hairy legs and no stockings, only sandals. I do think that when people have hairy legs they ought to wear stockings, don’t you? Or do something about it. But no, she was just laughing and joking and you saw whatever happened to her she’d come out
all right. A great big, red, square face she had, and those hairy legs. But she didn’t care a damn.’
‘Perhaps it’s being sophisticated,’ Mr Severn suggested, ‘like your friend Heather.’
‘Oh, her – no, she won’t get on either. She’s too ambitious, she wants too much. She’s so sharp she cuts herself as you might say . . . No, it isn’t being pretty and it isn’t being sophisticated. It’s being – adapted, that’s what it is. And it isn’t any good wanting to be adapted, you’ve got to be born adapted.’
‘Very clear,’ Mr Severn said. Adapted to the livid sky, the ugly houses, the grinning policemen, the placards in shop windows.
‘You’ve got to be young, too. You’ve got to be young to enjoy a thing like this – younger than we are,’ Maidie said as the taxi drew up.
Mr Severn stared at her, too shocked to be angry.
‘Well, good-bye.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Mr Severn, giving her a black look and ignoring her outstretched hand. ‘We’ indeed!
Two hundred and ninety-six steps along Coptic Street. One hundred and twenty round the corner. Forty stairs up to his flat. A dozen inside it. He stopped counting.
His sitting-room looked well, he thought, in spite of the crumpled papers. It was one of its good times, when the light was just right, when all the incongruous colours and shapes became a whole – the yellow-white brick wall with several of the Museum pigeons perched on it, the silvered drainpipe, the chimneys of every fantastical shape, round, square, pointed, and the odd one with the mysterious hole in the middle through which the grey, steely sky looked at you, the solitary trees – all framed in the silver oilcloth curtains (Hans’s idea), and then with a turn of his head he saw the woodcuts from Amsterdam, the chintz-covered armchairs, the fading bowl of flowers in the long mirror.
An old gentleman wearing a felt hat and carrying a walking-stick passed the window. He stopped, took off his hat and coat, and, balancing the stick on the end of his nose, walked backwards and forwards, looking up expectantly. Nothing happened. Nobody thought him worth a penny. He put his hat and coat on again and, carrying the stick in a respectable manner, vanished round the corner. And, as he did so, the tormenting phrases vanished too – ‘Who pays? Will you pay now, please? You don’t mind if I leave you, dear? I died waiting. I died waiting. (Or was it I died hating?) That was my father speaking. Pictures, pictures, pictures. You’ve got to be young. But tigers are better-looking, aren’t they? SOS, SOS, SOS. If I was a bird and had wings I could fly away, couldn’t I? Might get shot as you went. But tigers are better-looking, aren’t they? You’ve got to be younger than we are . . .’ Other phrases, suave and slick, took their place.
The swing’s the thing, the cadence of the sentence. He had got it.
He looked at his eye in the mirror, then sat down at the typewriter and with great assurance tapped out ‘Jubilee . . .’
Outside the Machine
The big clinic near Versailles was run on strictly English lines, so every morning the patients in the women’s general ward were woken up at six. They had tea and bread-and-butter. Then they lay and waited while the nurses brought tin basins and soap. When they had washed they lay and waited again.
There were fifteen beds in the tall, narrow room. The walls were painted grey. The windows were long but high up, so that you could see only the topmost branches of the trees in the grounds outside. Through the glass the sky had no colour.
At half-past ten the matron, attended by a sister, came in to inspect the ward, walking as though she were royalty opening a public building. She stopped every now and again, glanced at a patient’s temperature chart here, said a few words there. The young woman in the last bed but one on the left-hand side was a newcomer. ‘Best, Inez,’ the chart said.
‘You came last evening, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Quite comfortable?’
‘Oh yes, quite.’
‘Can’t you do without all those things while you are here?’ the matron asked, meaning the rouge, powder, lipstick and hand-mirror on the bed table.
‘It’s so that I shouldn’t look too awful, because then I always feel much worse.’
But the matron shook her head and walked on without smiling, and Inez drew the sheets up to her chin, feeling bewildered and weak. I’m cold, I’m tired.
*
‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re very much like Raquel Meller?’ the old lady in the next bed said. She was sitting up, wrapped in a black shawl embroidered with pink and yellow flowers.
‘Am I? Oh, am I really?’
‘Yes, very much like.’
‘Do you think so?’ Inez said.
The tune of ‘La Violetera’, Raquel Meller’s song, started up in her head. She felt happier – then quite happy and rather gay. ‘Why should I be so damned sad?’ she thought. ‘It’s ridiculous. The day after I come out of this place something lucky might happen.’
And it was not so bad lying here and having everything done for you. It was only when you moved that you got frightened because you couldn’t imagine ever moving again without hurting yourself.
She looked at the row of beds opposite and sighed. ‘It’s rum here, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, you’ll feel different tomorrow,’ the old lady said. She spoke English hesitatingly – not with an accent, but as if her tongue were used to another language.
The two talked a good deal that day, off and on.
‘. . . And how was I to know,’ Inez complained, ‘that on top of everything else, my inside would go kaput like this? And of course it must happen at the wrong time.’
‘Now, shut up,’ she told herself, ‘shut up. Don’t say, “Just when I haven’t any money.” Don’t give yourself away. What a fool you are!’ But she could not stop the flood of words.
At intervals the old lady clicked her tongue compassionately or said ‘Poor child’. She had a broad, placid face. Her hair was black – surely dyed, Inez thought. She wore two rings with coloured stones on the third finger of her left hand and one – a thick gold ring carved into an indistinguishable pattern – on the little finger. There was something wrong with her knee, it appeared, and she had tried several other hospitals.
‘French hospitals are more easy-going, but I was very lucky to get into this place, it has quite a reputation. There’s nothing like English nursing. And, considering what you get, you pay hardly anything. An English matron, a resident English doctor, several of the nurses are English. I believe the private rooms are most luxurious, but of course they are very expensive.’
Her name was Tavernier. She had left England as a young girl and had never been back. She had been married twice. Her first husband was a bad man, her second husband was a good man. Just like that. Her second husband was a good man who had left her a little money.
When she talked about the first husband you could tell that she still hated him, after all those years. When she talked about the good one tears came into her eyes. She said that they were perfectly happy, completely happy, never an unkind word and tears came into her eyes.
‘Poor old mutt,’ Inez thought, ‘she really has persuaded herself to believe that.’
Madame Tavernier said in a low voice, ‘Do you know what he said in the last letter he wrote to me? “You are everything to me.” Yes, that’s what he said in the last letter I had.’
‘Poor old mutt,’ Inez thought again.
Madame Tavernier wiped her eyes. Her face looked calm and gentle, as if she were repeating to herself, ‘Nobody can say this isn’t true, because I’ve got the letter and I can show it.’
The fat, fair woman in the bed opposite was also chatting with her neighbour. They were both blonde, very clean and aggressively respectable. For some reason they fitted in so well with their surroundings that they made everyone else seem dubious, out of place. The fat one discussed the weather, and her neighbour’s answers were like an echo. ‘Hot . . . oh yes, very hot . . . hotter than yesterday . . . yes
, much hotter . . . I wish the weather would break . . . yes, I wish it would, but no chance of that . . . no, I suppose not . . . oh, rather fancy so . . .’
Under cover of this meaningless conversation the fair woman’s stare at Inez was sharp, sly and inquisitive. ‘An English person? English, what sort of English? To which of the seven divisions, sixty-nine subdivisions, and thousand-and-three sub-subdivisions do you belong? (But only one sauce, damn you.) My world is a stable, decent world. If you withhold information, or if you confuse me by jumping from one category to another, I can be extremely disagreeable, and I am not without subtlety and inventive powers when I want to be disagreeable. Don’t underrate me. I have set the machine in motion and crushed many like you. Many like you . . .’
Madame Tavernier shifted uneasily in her bed, as if she sensed this clash of personalities – stares meeting in mid-air, sparks flying . . .
‘Those two ladies just opposite are English,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, are they?’
‘And so is the one in the bed on the other side of you.’
‘The sleepy one they make such a fuss about?’
‘She’s a dancer – a “girl”, you know. One of the Yetta Kauffman girls. She’s had an operation for appendicitis.’
‘Oh, has she?’
‘The one with the screen round her bed,’ Madame Tavernier chattered on, ‘is very ill. She’s not expected to – And the one . . .’
Inez interrupted after a while. ‘They seem to have stuck all the English down this end, don’t they? I wish they had mixed us up a bit more.’
‘They never do,’ Madame Tavernier answered. ‘I’ve often noticed it.’
‘It’s a mistake,’ said Inez. ‘English people are usually pleasanter to foreigners than they are to each other.’
After a silence Madame Tavernier inquired politely, ‘Have you travelled a lot?’
‘Oh, a bit.’
‘And do you like it here?’
‘Yes, I like Paris much the best.’
‘I suppose you feel at home,’ Madame Tavernier said. Her voice was ironical. ‘Like many people. There’s something for every taste.’