Quartet quotes

‘

They touch life with gloves on.

They’re pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still....’

Still, there were moments when she realized that her existence, though delightful, was haphazard. It lacked, as it were, solidity; it lacked the necessary fixed background.

A bedroom, balcony and cabinet de toilette in a cheap Montmartre hotel cannot possibly be called a solid background.

Miss De Solla, who had by this time pretty well exhausted her fascinating subject, stopped talking.

‘I like Mrs Heidler anyway; she’s a very sensible woman; no nonsense there. She’s one of the few people in Montparnasse whom I do like. Most of them....

But abuse isn’t any good, and it’s better to be clean than kind.

’

Marya said: ‘Well, was everything all right?’ And when he answered, ‘Yes,’ she asked no further questions.

Stephan disliked being questioned and, when closely pressed, he lied. He just lied.

Not plausibly or craftily, but impatiently and absent-mindedly. So Marya had long ago stopped questioning. For she was reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature, and for the first time in her life she was very near to being happy.

1 touring company. An odd life. Morose landladies, boiled onion suppers. Bottles of gin in the dressing-room. Perpetual manicuring of one’s nails in the Sunday train. Perpetual discussions about men. (‘Swine, deary, swine.’)

The chorus knew all about men, judged them with a rapid and terrible accuracy.

Marya had longed to play a glittering part—she was nineteen then—against the sombre and wonderful background of London. She had visited a theatrical agent;

Beyond that point she remained apart, lonely, frightened of her loneliness, resenting it passionately. She grew thin. She began to live her hard and monotonous life very mechanically and listlessly.

A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike.

One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn’t what one had expected of life. Not in the very least.

A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike.

One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn’t what one had expected of life.

Not in the very least.

But at any rate it didn’t bulge out in all sorts of unexpected places. Most people hesitated. They fumbled. They were so full of reticences and prejudices and uncertainties and spites and shames, that there was no getting anywhere at all.

One felt after a time a blankness and a jar—like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there.

But, good or bad, there Monsieur Zelli was. Definite. A person. He criticized her clothes with authority and this enchanted her.

Definite. A person. He criticized her clothes with authority and this enchanted her. He told her that her arms were too thin, that she had a Slav type and a pretty silhouette, that if she were happy and petted she would become charming.

Happy, petted, charming—these are magical words.

And the man knew what he was talking about, Marya could see that.

Eighteen months later they went to Brussels for a year. By the time they returned to Paris every vestige of suspicion had left her. She felt that her marriage, though risky, had been a success. And that was that.

Her life swayed regularly, even monotonously, between two extremes, avoiding the soul-destroying middle.

Sometimes they had a good deal of money and immediately spent it. Sometimes they had almost none at all and then they would skip a meal and drink iced white wine on their balcony instead.

From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche. Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre.

It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.

The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking.

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things.

The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.

All sorts of things.

She had always known that it was there—hidden under the more or less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.

You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn’t argue.

It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.

Madame Hautchamp was formidable.

One heard the wheels of society clanking as she spoke.

No mixing. No ill feeling either. All so inevitable that one could only bow the head and submit.

‘Why should I tell her all this?’ But she felt impelled to go on. ‘I may be completely wrong, of course, but that’s how I feel. Well, I’ve got used to the idea of facing cruelty. One can, you know.

The moment comes when even the softest person doesn’t care a damn any more; and that’s a precious moment.

One oughtn’t to waste it. You’re wonderfully kind, but if I come to stay with you it’ll only make me soft and timid and I’ll have to start getting hard all over again afterwards.

Marya stayed there for a long time watching a little frail, blonde girl, who careered past, holding tightly on to the neck of her steed, her face tense and strained with delight.

The merry-go-round made her feel more normal, less like a grey ghost walking in a vague, shadowy world.

The day before Marya left the Hôtel de l’Univers she received a money order for five pounds from her aunt and namesake enclosed in a letter:

‘Stephan’s a—a vivid sort of person, you see. What a stupid word! I mean, natural. Natural as an animal. He made me come alive; he taught me everything. I was happy.

Sometimes just the way the light fell would make me unutterably happy.

’

She felt remote and lonely perched up on the model-stand, listening. Besides, after a time she began to feel that she knew all there was to be known about the various couples of Beautiful Young Men or the charm and chic of Plump Polly.

The Beautiful Young Men undulated—they wore jerseys and bérets basques; they were spiteful and attractive and talented, and could be little English gentlemen when they liked.

‘And that,’ said Lois, ‘is a very useful quality. In fact—call me a snob if you like—it’s my favourite quality. That and good dancing. And, after all, you’ve got to be careful, haven’t you? There’s no knowing what you mightn’t be let in for.

The spring came early that year and very suddenly. So that one day the branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens were bare and grim and the next they waved cool leaves in a kind wind.

Or so it seemed. Then the chestnuts flowered and the girls walking along with linked arms began to discuss their new clothes endlessly. ‘Ma robe verte ... mon costume gris....’

‘I love you’ they played, and Valencia and Mon Paris. The sound was still in her ears. And the voice of that little funny man. What was his name? The little sculptor. ‘You’re a victim. There’s no endurance in your face.

Victims are necessary so that the strong may exercise their will and become more strong.

’

‘I shall have to go away,’ she decided. ‘Of course. Naturally.’

Sleep was like falling into a black hole.

Next morning she woke early and lay watching the wind blow the striped curtain outwards. It was like the sail of a ship, she thought. Voices, steps, a knock on the door. She held her breath.

She remembered her tears and her submissions and the long hours she had spent walking between two rows of street lamps, solitary, possessed by pity as by a devil. ‘I’ve been wasting my life,’ she thought. ‘How have I stood it for so long?’

And her longing for joy, for any joy, for any pleasure was a mad thing in her heart.

It was sharp like pain and she clenched her teeth. It was like some splendid caged animal roused and fighting to get out. It was an unborn child jumping, leaping, kicking at her side.

People went ludicrously wrong. You told the truth, the stark truth—or perhaps you gave it a fig-leaf so as not to harrow too much—and everybody said: ‘Come, come,’ and ‘Don’t tell me,’ and: ‘Do you think I was born yesterday?’

You told lies and they said: ‘Ah, the cri du cœur!’

Supposing that she said: ‘Very well then, I will tell you. Listen. Heidler thinks he loves me and I love him. Terribly. I don’t like him or trust him. I love him. D’you get me?

They were so obviously husband and wife, so suited to each other, they were even in some strange way a little alike.

‘Every pot has its lid,’ says the French proverb, or perhaps Belgian—but French or Belgian, it’s a good proverb.

Lois sat sturdily, with her knees, as usual, a little apart; her ungloved hands were folded over a huge leather handbag;

Marya thought: ‘Oh, Lord! what a fool I am.’ Her heart felt as if it were being pinched between somebody’s fingers. Cocktails, the ridiculous rabbits on the wallpaper.

All the fun and sweetness of life hurt so abominably when it was always just out of your reach.

Dinner was a silent, solemn meal. A dog howled with melancholy persistency. Lois sat with an invulnerable expression on her dark face. It was as if she were saying: ‘You can’t down me. My roots go very deep.’

They were wonderful goats, five of them, all black and white, and they crossed the street calmly, avoiding trams with dignity and skill. One behind the other and no jostling, like the perfect ladies that they were.

Marya listened to the music of the pipe, dwindling away in the distance, persistent as the hope of happiness.

Then she lunched at Boots’ Bar (once A la Savoyard, renamed by the proprietor, an anglophile), and after lunch went back to her melancholy bedroom and slept, for she had lain awake all night, tormented by doubts and fears.

If this was love—this perpetual aching longing, this wound that bled persistently and very slowly. And the devouring hope. And the fear. That was the worst. The fear she lived with—that the little she had would be taken from her.

Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud—well down—and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful.

Like—like Rasputin. Marya began to laugh.

Four days of this.

Four days can be a long time.

Across the street was a tobacco shop where they sold pneumatiques. She went there, bought a card and wrote to Heidler, standing at the counter.

The beach was strewn with old sardine tins and fishing nets spread to dry in the sun. A little white boat, called Je m’en fous, heaved very slowly up and down at the end of its rope.

Beyond the pebbles and the sardine tins the sea was the colour of a field of blue hyacinths.

Marya lay in the sun hour after hour and her thoughts were vague and pale, like ghosts. At the back of the beach a sparse line of eucalyptus trees danced gaily in the wind.

‘I’ve got a room for you in a hotel near the Gare du Nord,’ said Stephan. He took her arm protectingly. ‘You’re awfully tired, aren’t you? Stay here for a moment; give me the fiche of your baggage.’ It was a grey morning.

The sky was the colour of train smoke.

‘My friend Jacques Bernadet lives in that quarter,’ he explained in the taxi, ‘in the Rue Bleue. But I’ll tell you afterwards; you must have breakfast and a rest first.’

Let me once be out of this misery and I wouldn’t be back in a hurry, I tell you! My God, Paris. Paris. Well, and then?

Without money Paris is as rotten as anywhere else and worse.

’

She had taken off her hat. Her hair, which was curly and worn cut to the neck, fell very beautifully about her face and smelt of some warm perfume. Her mouth was like a child’s.

‘Paris is the most beautiful place in the world,’ she said seriously. ‘Everybody knows that.’

Monsieur Bernadet chanted with sarcasm:

Well, and what’s the use of that? One stays and cries, that’s all. And there’s so much that I want to forget and so much that I don’t dare to think of. I’m not myself any more.

Life is pressing on me all the time. Constantly.

To doubt everything. My God, it’s horrible, I must get away. If I could get away, I might be myself again. There’s an emigration bureau at Genoa. I’m going there.... Partir. Partir. To get away,’ he muttered.

He told her:

‘You don’t know what it is, la misère. Nobody knows what it is till it’s got them.’

Marya looked away and answered slowly: ‘No. That’s true. Nobody knows what it is till it’s got them. But suppose that I could borrow some money. I might be able to.’

Monsieur Bernadet said: ‘What? Well, it’s no use making philosophy about these things.

Nearly everybody will be vache if you give them a chance; the best way is not to give them a chance.

That’s life.

‘I’ve got to be clever,’ she thought, ‘clever.’

Then again something in her head clicked and jarred like a rundown machine.

It was cold on the café terrace. She began to shiver.