Martha, Eric, and George

by Margery Sharp

  “Then since you leave for Paris at noon, you should be getting your sleep.”

  “I can sleep on the way,” said Martha. “That is, if I still go.”

  “If?” articulated Mr. Joyce. “What do you mean, if?”

  “Well, if you can’t come, where’s the point?” suggested Martha. “Le maître’s got my canvases, he’d see them hung all right, he could send us all the notices while I stayed here with you. We’ve only to wire him—”

  “Stop,” said Mr. Joyce. Painfully he reared himself against the pillows the better to scrutinize her face. “And be honest. Be honest! Is it from affection for the old man you wish to stay, or because you perceive the opportunity to avoid making personal appearances?”

  Under his still shrewd old eye, Martha hesitated.

  “Well, I’m very fond of you—”

  “Thank you. That is the first time you have said it, but I thank you for saying it now. Continue,” ordered Mr. Joyce.

  “Well, I never much wanted to go in the first place,” admitted Martha.

  “So it was plain!”

  “Wasn’t I still going all the same, just to please you? I am fond,” argued Martha. “But now that you can’t come too, to enjoy all the fuss and chi-chi, which is the sort of thing you like and I’m turned up by, it did strike me I might dodge out.”

  Mr. Joyce relaxed. He was a man of in some ways truly remarkable character. Martha’s admission was far more welcome to him than would have been any sobbed-out plea of devotion—an artist having no business to be devoted save to his art. Mr. Joyce looked at the broad, strong-fingered hand lying in Martha’s lap, and recognized it, gladly, as not a hand to smooth pillows, or cool a fevered brow, but a hand to paint with …

  “Besides, I thought you might want me to stay,” added Martha.

  “Do not be a fool,” said Mr. Joyce, quite strongly. “Have I not been paying good money over how many years, to see you at last recognized? Am I to die unfulfilled?—Just now forget me, when you come back you will find me on my pins again!” promised Mr. Joyce. “You shall tell me all that happens, we will have a fine time! Go away now, get some sleep, go to Paris!”

  Chapter Ten

  1

  Martha thus made the most important journey of her life alone. The circumstance didn’t however entail any particular effort: travelling with Mr. Joyce she’d have flown; left to herself, she took the old students’ route via Newhaven and Dieppe; but it was Tommy who bought the tickets, and saw her onto the train, and wired to le maître to meet her—as it was Tommy who’d driven through the night to collect her packed bags while Martha snored on a sofa in the lobby of the nursing-home. (The matron was absent; also Mr. Joyce was paying astronomical fees; also when Martha simply lay down and went to sleep the night-sister hadn’t the hardihood to remonstrate.) Martha boarded the Dieppe boat, and confronted the crossing, and the subsequent train-journey, in very good trim; and at the Gare St. Lazare one of the busiest men in Paris had been waiting for her for about half an hour.

  2

  Considering the terms on which they’d parted ten years before, the reunion was thoroughly amicable. By common consent, bygones were to be bygone.

  “You haven’t changed much,” observed Martha.

  “Nor you,” replied le maître.

  Actually it struck him as only too true. Everything helps, in establishing a reputation; it was le maître’s ambition that Martha should conquer not only the critics but also that small, influential, gossiping cabal known as tout Paris. He wanted to see her a celebrity on the full scale. But now surveying her appearance in detail, he felt his heart sink. Martha was if anything plainer than he remembered her, certainly heavier; also in May, in Paris, wore a bulky serge overcoat (because she was travelling), sandals (because it was getting on for summer), and on her head one of Mr. Joyce’s old hats.

  “What other clothes have you?” asked le maître uneasily, as they waited for a taxi.

  “Well, of course I’ve brought an overall,” said Martha. “I thought I might come back to the studio a bit. I can’t go a whole fortnight without working.”

  “But for the private view, for example?”

  Martha looked vague.

  “I expect someone’s packed a skirt I’ve got—if I can still get into it. Mr. Joyce—”

  “How is he?” interrupted le maître. (It was as disjointed as are all conversations, outside a railway station, looking for a taxi.)

  “He’ll be on his pins again before I get back.—He said, of course it was before he knew he couldn’t come, we’d get me anything I needed over here. Only I don’t see why I should waste his money.”

  It was the single reference she ever made, ever was to make, to money. Martha’s purse actually contained no more than the few francs change from a ten-shilling note used to pay for tea on the train. (With mirabelle-jam.) She wasn’t therefore worried. That Mr. Joyce had already transferred to le maître sufficient funds to cover all impending expenses she didn’t know; merely assumed all expenses taken care of. Le maître, small-salaried below his deserts, when they at last found a taxi noted the fare with some accuracy—to be laid off against Mr. Joyce’s account; Martha simply sat back and enjoyed the ride. Actually her thought for her patron’s pocket sprang purely from a dislike of shopping, and particularly of trying-on.

  “I only look worse,” added Martha cheerfully, “in good clothes.”

  Le maître mentally agreed that with that figure she was probably right. At close quarters in the taxi, however, as he suddenly perceived the extreme beauty of her skin, pearly as the flesh of a Chinese lichee, also the monumental, Chinese pose of her whole big body, it occurred to him that in a certain mandarin-robe he possessed—indigo-blue, figure-concealing—she might achieve something like magnificence. But could Martha be persuaded into a mandarin-robe, even for the private view? Le maître very much doubted it …

  What he had on his hands, in the words of Mr. Joyce long ago, was a young savage. Again surveying Martha’s deplorable outfit le maître felt thankful that he had booked her room not at the Crillon or the Georges Cinq, but at a quiet little private hotel in the rue d’Antibes.

  3

  It was a circumstance that coloured the whole of Martha’s stay in Paris.

  As the taxi turned the corner, le maître was already revising some of his plans for her. That she would have an artistic success he still didn’t doubt; the visions of a wider, personal triumph were fading fast. In any social situation only wit could redeem that appearance—and God knew Martha had never been witty. (Also had never bothered to learn French.) Le maître in short was prepared to cut the loss and spare himself useless effort—it being impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or a celebrity out of a young person who obviously lacked the temperament to behave like one …

  A moment later, as the taxi stopped outside a modest portal, Martha was behaving like a celebrity indeed.

  “I’m not going to stay here,” said Martha positively.

  “Why not?” asked le maître, surprised.

  Martha jammed her elbow under the door-handle.

  “Mr. Joyce said I could stay anywhere I liked.”

  “But you have not even seen inside!” argued le maître reasonably. “I assure you, it is very comfortable—”

  “Even from the outside I can see it’s a flea-pit,” retorted Martha.—Nothing could have been more unjust; the entrance, if modest, was immaculate. But Martha piled libel on libel. “It looks like a flea-pit run by the dope-trade,” elaborated Martha furiously. “It looks like a brothel. It looks like a flea-pit and a brothel and an opium den, and I’m damned if I’m going to stay in it. Tell the taxi to go on, or else drive me back to the station.”

  As a display of temperament, it was impressive. Martha’s face was scarlet, her voice so loud that her comminations might well have penetrated into that innocent, libelled lobby. Le maître’s eye brightened.

  “Very well; where do you want to stay?”
/>
  Unhesitatingly, Martha picked the most expensive hotel in Paris.—Not the Crillon or the Georges Cinq, but a far smaller, more exclusive establishment on the Quai Voltaire: Le Relais d’Angoulême. That Martha knew of it at all struck le maître to fresh admiration; though its restaurant was famous, only the cognoscenti were aware of the few rooms disposable on its upper floors. They were reached by the broad, low treads of an eighteenth-century staircase, the Relais being in fact an old coaching-inn, and so furnished as to make an antique-dealer’s mouth water. Distinguished playwrights went to earth there to wrestle with a third act, men of distinction in general for discreet relaxation. How Martha knew of it was because though the furniture was antique the pictures on the walls were modern, by modern masters—the Relais’s intelligent proprietor having bought early and cheap. In Martha’s student days she’d more than once stumped into the lobby to look at a Modigliani.

  “The Relais d’Angoulême,” ordered Martha.

  As le maître afterwards acknowledged, it was the ideal headquarters, for a celebrity. If no tourist knew of the Relais, every Paris journalist did. For a celebrity, it was the best possible address. And if it was only by luck there was a room vacant, le maître took it for a good omen.

  —Not entirely by luck either. The manageress at first shook her head: in May, at the Relais, how could monsieur hope to find a room vacant?

  “Tell her who I am!” ordered Martha imperiously.

  Again as le maître afterwards acknowledged, it probably wasn’t his own eloquence that did the trick so much as Martha’s newly-released, visibly-expanding personality. Rarely does the foreigner dare to be bad-tempered, in a Paris hotel; more rarely still, if female, to stump in looking like a tramp and expect preferential treatment. The manageress wasn’t a woman easily impressed, but she was impressed by Martha.

  “If upon the fourth floor—” she began uncertainly.

  “Tell her lower down,” said Martha—who could understand French if she couldn’t speak it.

  An hotel like the Relais always has its resources. The woman shot a brief glance of enquiry towards le maître; who slightly nodded. He was something of a Parisian figure himself, and the awareness of Mr. Joyce’s money behind him by no means diminished his natural authority. It was still Martha who did the trick. In a later conversation with the proprietor, explaining the motive of her submission, the manageress described Martha as a personage quite out of the ordinary …

  She said much the same thing to a journalist taking a pre-dinner apéritif. “We have a guest here quite extraordinary,” murmured the manageress. “Look in the restaurant, you may write a paragraph! Also watch the galleries; it appears she is also a painter, and is about to show …”

  There is no justice in this world. It was Martha’s refusal to lodge in the rue d’Antibes lest she might therein encounter an ex-lover and an innocent, abandoned son, that started her off on the right foot in Paris.

  4

  “When do I hang?” asked Martha, extracting a snail.

  “To-morrow,” said le maître. “You will have all day to-morrow.—Do you like those things?” he added, as Martha chewed with more resolution than apparent pleasure.

  “Not much,” said Martha. “They taste like india-rubber.”

  “You should know,” agreed le maître. “Then why choose them?”

  Martha swallowed.

  “The last time Mr. Joyce was over here, we had them.”

  “Ah!” said le maître. “There should be a telegram sent him, to announce your safe arrival.”

  “Haven’t you done it?” asked Martha, rather severely.

  “And when, pray, should I have had time?” retorted le maître—a patient man, but by now a tired one.

  “While I was washing,” said Martha calmly.

  It was definitely a celebrity he had on his hands.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  There are shows and shows, in Paris. There are shows put on in compliment to the daughter of a powerful newspaper proprietor; stop-gap shows put on to keep a gallery open; pathetically hopeful, hopeless little shows put on by two or three aspirants in a borrowed studio. There are also the full-blown promotions on the boulevards which not only make artistic headlines but become the talk of tout Paris. Martha’s was one of these.

  She had of course an enormous, formidable talent. She had also le maître’s expertise behind her, and Mr. Joyce’s money.—Naturally no hint of venality has ever tainted the reputation of a Parisian critic, but a series of small, excellent preliminary dinners does no harm, nor is it a disadvantage if at the private view the champagne doesn’t run out. (“Let it also be top-quality,” had instructed Mr. Joyce. “Do not pike!”) Le maître didn’t pike; if on the walls one saw marvels, on the buffets, besides Piper-Heidsieck, one saw caviare. He nonetheless faced the occasion with less than his usual aplomb.

  “What am I supposed to do?” asked Martha glumly, as they waited in the empty gallery.

  “First you will be photographed, then you will circulate,” instructed le maître.

  “I shan’t know anybody,” objected Martha.

  “That does not matter, they will know you. There will be,” said le maître grimly, “no mistaking you.”

  There was that at least to be said for Martha’s appearance, but at the moment le maître regretted it. (M. Cerisier, the gallery’s proprietor, just then entering, at the sight of her emitted a whinny of dismay.) Martha had gone so far as to put on a skirt—not one of her dirndls, the female student who’d packed for her being of the tailor-made faction: of black shantung, originally well cut but now unaccountably some four inches longer behind than before. Over it, a denim smock drooped contrariwise, longer in front; clean, but with several buttons missing. Her sandals, though solidly secured, were rather dirty. On her head, she wore Mr. Joyce’s old hat.

  —Why hadn’t he forced her, le maître asked himself belatedly, into that mandarin-robe? The answer of course was that no one could force Martha into anything: as Eric had discovered ten years before, attempting to force her into the mandarin-robe of matrimony …

  “The first arrivals!” cried M. Cerisier, hastily downing a preliminary, a necessary glass of champagne. “Mademoiselle, let me beg of you, attempt to cooperate!”

  2

  At any rate Martha stood passive before the cameras—arousing indeed in the breast of one particularly avant-garde photographer such enthusiasm for her massive planes, he got down on the floor to produce a sort of tilted mountain-scape; say one of the Juras. Martha stood patiently until they’d all finished, because after all it was their living; but then less circulated than stumped about stolid, bad-tempered—and dumb. She never said much in English; and of French, despite a year in Paris, knew scarcely more than oui and non.

  In fact this was rather a relief, to her dedicated impresario. When le maître contemplated what she might have said—to a foolish fashionable duchess, to a high-flying art-critic—he was well content with her taciturnity. He himself could, and did, say all that was necessary, to leave duchess and critic equally flattered rather than outraged; and hearing Martha actually speaking to someone, hastened like a fire-engine to a fire.

  It was Sally the pretty American, her old fellow-student, Martha was talking to—and all the more willingly because Sally never had, and didn’t now, cast an eye at a painting when she could look at a hat.

  “Honey, yours—!” began Sally, before words failed her. (Her own general appearance was a masterpiece of throw-away elegance: amber wild-silk cut like a trench-coat, worn with fifty cents’ worth of gilt beads. Of course her shoes had cost as many dollars, and the twist of velvet on her head considerably more,—Le maître, even as he held himself ready to intervene, alerted a photographer.) “And didn’t you ever get that frock I sent you,” wailed Sally, “for just such an occasion as this? Mother Bunch, you’re hopeless!”

  Martha, hearing her old studio-nickname, smiled. (The photographer captured it: Martha’s smile;
rare as Queen Victoria’s, and as memorable.)

  “It was smashing,” said Martha, “only I felt a fool in it. If you’d like it back to have taken in—”

  “Don’t insult me,” said Sally amiably. “Especially when I ought to be at a very special fitting this minute! Only seeing you had a show, I just couldn’t miss the opening.—I’ve bought two,” added Sally casually.

  “What, dresses?” asked Martha.

  “Of your pictures,” said Sally. “We’ve a very large apartment.”

  Le maître, listening, now presented his broad back as a barrier against interruption.—It was remarkable, he thought, that Martha had ever made such a connection. He himself now remembered Sally well, as his prettiest and richest, also least serious student—as Martha had been the plainest and most dedicated; but that the two had been friends came as a welcome surprise.

  “Will you lend them if I ever show in New York?” asked Martha practically.

  “Certainly we will,” agreed Sally. “We’re always loaning pictures some place or other. I guess it’s a hazard of gracious living.—But, oh, Mother Bunch, d’you remember that attic we shared, when you and I and that Swede all went on a sketching-party to that village?”

  Indeed Martha remembered their attic, in the house of Madame P. the local midwife. She remembered a subsequent visit even better—though not so much as the occasion when she’d given birth to a son, as the occasion when she’d for the first time perceived colour. (In an orchard, recalled Martha accurately; as mirabelle-plums dropped amber and red-speckled first to confuse, then to illumine, a thitherto strictly subfusc palette …)

  “I’ve always been glad you came,” said Sally frankly, “because Nils really was attractive, and if you hadn’t been there as gooseberry I might have had a really serious affair with him—which my darling Bob I’m now married to wouldn’t have appreciated at all. You’ve positively got to stay with us, Mother Bunch, when you come to New York—and if there’s any difficulty about a gallery, just let me know and I’ll tell Dad to fix it.”