W. Somerset Maugham - Christmas Holiday (W. Somerset Maugham) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

“What on earth do you mean?”

“One of the reasons why I wanted you to come over was to see exactly in what your charm consisted. As far as I can tell, it depends on some peculiar muscular formation of your lower orbit. I believe it to be due to a little crease under your eyes when you smile.”

It embarrassed Charley to be thus anatomised, and to divert the conversation from himself he asked:

“But all this effort of yours, what is it going to lead you to?”

“Who can tell? Let’s go and have our coffee at the Dôme.”

“All right. I’ll get hold of a waiter.”

“I’m going to stand you your dinner. It’s the first meal that we’ve had together that I’ve ever paid for.”

When he took out of his pocket some notes to settle up with he found with them a couple of cards.

“Oh, look, I’ve got a ticket for you for the Midnight Mass at St. Eustache. It’s supposed to be the best church music in Paris and I thought you’d like to go.”

“Oh, Simon, how nice of you. I should love to. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

“I’ll see how I feel when the time comes. Anyhow take the tickets.”

Charley put them in his pocket. They walked to the Dôme. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still wet and, when the light of a shop window or a street lamp fell upon it, palely glistened. A lot of people were wandering to and fro. They came out of the shadow of the leafless trees as though from the wings of a theatre, passed across the light and then were lost again in another patch of night. Cringing but persistent, the Algerian peddlers, their eyes alert for a possible buyer, passed with a bundle of Eastern rugs and cheap furs over their arms. Coarse-faced boys, a fez on their heads, carried baskets of monkey-nuts and monotonously repeated their raucous cry: cacaouettes, cacaouettes! At a corner stood two negroes, their dark faces pinched with cold, as though time had stopped and they waited because there was nothing in the world to do but wait. The two friends reached the Dôme. The terrace where in summer the customers sat in the open was glassed in. Every table was engaged, but as they came in a couple got up and they took the empty places. It was none too warm, and Simon wore no coat.

“Won’t you be cold?” Charley asked him. “Wouldn’t you prefer to sit inside?”

“No, I’ve taught myself not to mind cold.”

“What happens when you catch one?”

“I ignore it.”

Charley had often heard of the Dôme, but had never been there, and he looked with eager curiosity at the people who sat all round them. There were young men in turtle-neck sweaters, some of them with short beards, and girls bare-headed, in raincoats; he supposed they were painters and writers, and it gave him a little thrill to look at them.

“English or American,” said Simon, with a scornful shrug of the shoulders. “Wasters and rotters most of them, pathetically dressing up for a rôle in a play that has long ceased to be acted.”

Over there was a group of tall, fair-haired youths who looked like Scandinavians, and at another table a swarthy, gesticulating, loquacious band of Levantines. But the greater number were quiet French people, respectably dressed, shopkeepers from the neighbourhood who came to the Dôme because it was convenient, with a sprinkling of provincials who, like Charley, still thought it the resort of artists and students.

“Poor brutes, they haven’t got the money to lead the Latin Quarter life any more. They live on the edge of starvation and work like galley-slaves. I suppose you’ve read the Vie de Bohème? Rodolphe now wears a neat blue suit that he’s bought off the nail and puts his trousers under his mattress every night to keep them in shape. He counts every penny he spends and takes care to do nothing to compromise his future. Mimi and Musette are hard-working girls, trade unionists, who spend their spare evenings attending party meetings, and even if they lose their virtue, keep their heads.”

“Don’t you live with a girl?”

“No.”

“Why not? I should have thought it would be very pleasant. In the year you’ve been in Paris you must have had plenty of chances of picking someone up.”

“Yes, I’ve had one or two. Strange when you come to think of it. D’you know what my place consists of? A studio and a kitchen. No bath. The concierge is supposed to come and clean up every day, but she has varicose veins and hates climbing the stairs. That’s all I have to offer and yet there’ve been three girls who wanted to come and share my squalor with me. One was English, she’s got a job here in the International Communist Bureau, another was a Norwegian, she’s working at the Sorbonne, and one was French—you’d have thought she had more sense; she was a dressmaker and out of work. I picked her up one evening when I was going out to dinner; she told me she hadn’t had a meal all day and I stood her one. It was a Saturday night and she stayed till Monday. She wanted to stay on, but I told her to get out and she went. The Norwegian was rather a nuisance. She wanted to darn my socks and cook for me and scrub the floor. When I told her there was nothing doing she took to waiting for me at street corners, walking beside me in the street and telling me that if I didn’t relent she’d kill herself. She taught me a lesson that I’ve taken to heart. I had to be rather firm with her in the end.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Well, one day I told her that I was sick of her pestering. I told her that next time she addressed me in the street I’d knock her down. She was rather stupid and she didn’t know I meant it. Next day when I came out of my house—it was about twelve and I was just going to the office—she was standing on the other side of the street. She came up to me, with that hang-dog look of hers, and began to speak. I didn’t let her get more than two or three words out, I hit her on the chin and she went down like a nine-pin.”

Simon’s eyes twinkled with amusement.

“What happened then?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she got up again. I walked on and didn’t look round to see. Anyhow she took the hint and that’s the last I saw of her.”

The story made Charley very uncomfortable and at the same time made him want to laugh. But he was ashamed of this and remained silent.

“The comic one was the English communist. My dear, she was the daughter of a dean. She’d been to Oxford and she’d taken her degree in economics. She was terribly genteel, oh, a perfect lady, but she looked upon promiscuous fornication as a sacred duty. Every time she went to bed with a comrade she felt she was helping the Cause. We were to be good pals, fight the good fight together, shoulder to shoulder, and all that sort of thing. The dean gave her an allowance and we were to pool our resources, make my studio a Centre, have the comrades in to afternoon tea and discuss the burning questions of the day. I just told her a few home truths and that finished her.”

He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him. Charley had several things to say, but did not know how to put them so that they should not sound affected and so arouse Simon’s irony.

“But is it your wish to cut human relations out of your life altogether?” he asked, uncertainly.

“Altogether. I’ve got to be free. I daren’t let another person get a hold over me. That’s why I turned out the little sempstress. She was the most dangerous of the lot. She was gentle and affectionate. She had the meekness of the poor who have never dreamt that life can be other than hard. I could never have loved her, but I knew that her gratitude, her adoration, her desire to please, her innocent cheerfulness, were dangerous. I could see that she might easily become a habit of which I couldn’t break myself. Nothing in the world is so insidious as a woman’s flattery; our need for it is so enormous that we become her slave. I must be as impervious to flattery as I am indifferent to abuse. There’s nothing that binds one to a woman like the benefits one confers on her. She would have owed me everything, that girl; I should never have been able to escape from her.”