Chapter Eighteen
THE CONNECTION CAME very quickly. Lillian had not expected it for hours, because she knew the French telephone system, and also because she had the feeling that the sanatorium was terribly far away, as if it were on another planet.
“Bella Vista Sanatorium.”
Lillian was not sure whether she recognized the voice. It might still be Miss Heger. “Mr. Hollmann, please,” she said, and became aware of how her heart was pounding.
“One moment, please.”
She listened to the almost inaudible hum of the wires. Apparently, they were having to look for Hollmann. She glanced at the clock; it was after dinner at the sanatorium. Why am I so agitated? she thought. As if I were summoning a dead man.
“Hollmann. Who is speaking, please?”
She started in alarm—the voice was so clear. “Lillian,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Lillian Dunkerque.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Hollmann said incredulously: “Lillian! Where are you?”
“In Paris. Your telegram for Clerfayt came to me. It was forwarded by his hotel. I opened it by mistake.”
“You’re not in Brescia?”
“No,” she said, feeling a slight stab of pain. “I’m not in Brescia.”
“Didn’t Clerfayt want you to come?”
“No, he didn’t want me to.”
“I’m hanging over the radio,” Hollmann said. “I suppose you are, too, of course.”
“Yes, Hollmann.”
“He’s driving magnificently. The race is still wide open. I know him; he’s waiting his chance, letting the others drive their machines into the ground. He won’t put on the pressure till midnight, maybe even later—no, around midnight, I think. It’s a race against the clock—you know that. The wearing part of it is that he never knows himself what his position is; he only finds out when he stops for gas, and what he hears then may be already outdated. It’s a race with uncertainty—you understand me, Lillian?”
“Yes, Hollmann. A race with uncertainty. How are you?”
“Fine. The speeds are fantastic. Averages of seventy-five miles an hour and more. And many of the big motors are only now reaching the long straight stretches. Average speeds, Lillian, not maximum speeds!”
“Yes, Hollmann. You’re feeling well?”
“Very well. Much better, Lillian. What station are you listening to? Switch on Rome; Rome is closer to the race than Milan, now.”
“I have Rome. I’m glad to hear you’re better.”
“How about you, Lillian?”
“Very well. And—”
“It’s probably the right thing that you aren’t in Brescia—it’s raining like mad there. Though I wouldn’t have been able to stand it; I would have been right out there at the start. How are you feeling, Lillian?”
She knew what he meant. “Fine,” she said. “How is everything up there?”
“Same as ever. Little has changed in these few months.”
Few months, she thought. Had it not been years? “And how is—” She hesitated, but suddenly she knew that she had only telephoned to ask this question. “How is Boris?”
“Who?”
“Boris.”
“Boris Volkov? We don’t see much of him. He no longer comes to the sanatorium. I think he’s all right.”
“Have you seen him at all?”
“Yes, of course. Though it’s two or three weeks ago. He was walking his dog, the police dog; you know it, of course. We didn’t talk. How is it down below? As you imagined?”
“Pretty much,” Lillian said. “I suppose it always depends on what you make of it. Is there still snow on the mountain?”
Hollmann laughed. “Not any more. There are all those crocuses and things. Lillian—” He paused. “I’m going to be out of here in a few weeks. It isn’t a swindle. The Dalai Lama has told me.”
Lillian did not believe it. She had been told the same thing years ago. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Then we’ll see each other here. Shall I tell Clerfayt?”
“Better not, yet; I’m superstitious about those things. There—the latest news is coming in. You’ll have to listen, too! So long, Lillian.”
“So long, Hollmann.”
She had wanted to add something about Boris, but she did not do so. For a while, she looked at the black receiver; then she carefully placed it on the hook and gave way to her thoughts without taking account of them, until she became aware that she was crying. Like the rain in Brescia, she thought, and got up. How foolish I am! One has to pay for everything. Did I think I had already done so?
“The word ‘happiness’ has acquired an excessive importance in our times,” the Vicomte de Peystre said. “There have been centuries in which it was unknown. It was not a part of life. Read Chinese literature of the best epochs, or Indian or Greek classics. Instead of emotion, in which the word ‘happiness’ has its root, people sought an unperturbed, elevated sense of life. Where that is lost, the crises begin, the muddles of emotion, romanticism, and the search for happiness comes in as a foolish substitute.”
Lillian laughed. “Isn’t the other also a substitute?”
“One worthier of human dignity,” de Peystre replied.
“Is the one impossible without the other?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Almost always. In your case not, I think. That fascinates me. You have both. It presupposes a state of such pure despair that names for it, and for the despair also, are already matters of indifference. It is far beyond anarchy—on the polar plateau of solitude without the slightest grief. In you, I think, grief and rebellion have long ago mutually annihilated one another. Consequently, little things have the same value as big things. Details begin to take on radiance.”
“The eighteenth century is rising,” Lillian said with semi-mockery. “Didn’t you say you were its last scion?”
“Its last admirer.”
“It seems to me people talked a lot about happiness in that century.”
“Only in its bad periods. And even then, although people talked and raved about it, they were practical in the grand sense.”
“Until the guillotine came.”
“Until the guillotine came and the right to happiness was invented,” de Peystre agreed. “The guillotine always comes.”
Lillian finished her glass. “Isn’t all this a long prelude to the proposition you want to make to me: to become your mistress?”
De Peystre remained impassive. “Call it that if you like. It is a proposal to give you the framework you require. Or, rather, the framework which to my mind would suit you.”
“Like the setting for a stone.”
“Like the setting for a very precious stone.”
“A stone of pure despair?”
“Of blue-white loneliness. And blue-white courage, Mademoiselle. My compliments! And forgive my persistence. Diamonds with such fire are rare.” De Peystre set down his glass. “Would you like to hear the latest reports on the race in Italy now?”
“Here? In Maxim’s?”
“Why not? Albert, the master of this establishment, could gratify far more complicated wishes. If he cared to. And for you he would care to. I am sure he would; Albert has excellent eyesight.”
The orchestra began, in keeping with tradition, to play melodies from The Merry Widow. The waiter cleared the table. Albert cat-footed past them and gave instructions for a bottle of cognac to be brought to their table. It was neither dusty nor ornamented with the emblem of Napoleon; its only distinction was a small, handwritten label. “I told you he has excellent eyesight,” de Peystre remarked. “This is for you to try. Naturally, we must first warm it with our hands, inhale the bouquet and discuss it a little. The usual ceremonies. We are being watched.”
Lillian took her glass and without warming it in her hand or inhaling the fragrance, drank the liquor down. De Peystre laughed. Albert in his corner dispatched the flicker of a confirming smile from an impassi
ve face. The smile was followed a few minutes later by a waiter with a small bottle of framboise. He set smaller glasses on the table and poured carefully. “Aged raspberry liqueur,” de Peystre said reverently.
What would he do, Lillian thought, if I were to throw the raspberry liqueur into his overcultivated face? Probably he would understand that, too, and make a courtly phrase about it. She did not despise him; on the contrary, she found him as pleasant as a mild sedative, and had listened to him with interest. For her, he embodied the other side of existence. He had sublimated the anxiety of life into a cult of esthetic cynicism and tried to convert dangerous mountain paths into park walks. It changed nothing. When had she heard something like this before? Of course, with Levalli in Sicily. You needed money and little heart to live that way. You did not drive from Brescia to Brescia. You stayed in Brescia and told yourself that you were in Versailles early in the eighteenth century.
“I must go,” she said.
“How often you say that,” de Peystre declared. “It makes you irresistible. Is it your favorite phrase?”
She looked at him. “If you only knew how I would like to stay,” she said slowly after a pause. “Even alone, if I must—but only to stay. To stay. Everything else is a lie, and the courage of fear.”
She had him drop her off at her hotel. The night porter, in a state of high excitement, came forward to meet her. “Monsieur Clerfayt is in twelfth place! He’s overtaken six competitors. The announcer says he is a marvelous night driver.”
“He is, I know.”
“A glass of champagne to celebrate?”
“One should never celebrate too soon. Racing drivers are superstitious.”
Lillian sat in the small, dark lobby for a while. “If he goes on like this, he’ll be in Brescia again early tomorrow morning,” the night porter said.
“That, too,” Lillian replied, and stood up. “I’m going to have a last cup of coffee on the boulevard Saint-Michel.”
She was already treated there as a regular patron. The waiter watched over her. Gérard waited for her, and a group of students had formed a kind of guard of honor for her.
Gérard had the excellent trait of always being hungry. That gave her time to think while he gobbled. She loved looking out on the street where life drifted by with hot and comfortless eyes. It was difficult to believe that every single person possessed an immortal soul, when you saw this endless stream. Where would they all be going later? Did their souls disintegrate like their bodies? Or did they continue to drift about, haunting the boulevard, on these evenings of desire, pleasure, and despair, decomposing ghosts full of silent anxiety and the plea to be allowed to stay what they were and not to become soul fertilizer for others who at this moment were being thoughtlessly begotten behind the thousands of windows?
Gérard stopped eating at last. He had finished with an excellent Pont l’Evêque cheese. “How the crude animal process of ingesting nourishment in the form of roasted pieces of animal flesh and half-fermented milk products stimulates the poetic qualities of the soul!” he declared. “It is eternally astonishing and consoling!”
Lillian laughed. “From Brescia to Brescia,” she said.
“I do not understand this clear and simple sentence; but it seems to be relatively unassailable.” Gérard drank down his coffee. “It is even profound. From Brescia to Brescia! I shall use that as the title for my next volume of poems. You are taciturn tonight.”
“Not taciturn. Only without words.”
“From Brescia to Brescia?”
“Something like that.”
Gérard nodded. He sniffed his cognac. “It is a phrase that grows better by the minute. It leads to a plethora of platitudes which are all as deep as mine shafts.”
“I know another one,” Lillian said. “Everything is the same.”
Gérard set down his glass. “With or without imagination?”
“With all imagination.”
He nodded, relieved. “For a moment, I was afraid that you were depressed and about to trot out some deadly laundry-room maxim.”
“On the contrary—an extremely heart-warming insight.”
“The details are the same as the whole; this wine bottle is just as enchanting as a Raphael; the pimply girl student at that table has something in her of Medea and Aspasia. Life without perspective: everything is equally important and unimportant; everything is foreground, everything God. Is that what you mean?” Gérard asked.
Lillian smiled. “Approximately. How fast you are!”
“Too fast.” Gérard made a bitter grimace. “Too fast to experience it.” He took a large swallow of cognac. “If you have really felt that,” he went on lecturing, “there remain only three things for you—”
“As many as that!”
“To enter a Buddhist monastery, go crazy, or die—most suitably by suicide. Self-extinction is, as you know, one of the three ways in which we are superior to animals.”
Lillian did not ask what the other two were. “There is a fourth possibility,” she said. “But there is nothing particularly superior about it. Our trouble is that we think we have claim upon life. We have none. When we know that, a good deal of bitter honey suddenly becomes sweet.”
Gérard silently saluted her, with both hands held high. “He who expects nothing is never disappointed,” he declared. “The ultimate in minor truths.”
“For tonight,” Lillian replied, laughing. “The loveliest truths die overnight. How many corpses have to be swept up every morning!
And what strange things one sometimes talks about after sundown. I must go now.”
“You always say that, but you always come back.”
She looked at him in gratitude. “I do, don’t I? It’s odd that only poets know that.”
“They, too, don’t really know it. They only hope so.”
She walked along the quai des Grands-Augustins as far as the quai Voltaire, and then back through the narrow streets behind the quays. She was not afraid of walking alone at night; she had no fear of people.
On the rue de Seine she saw someone lying on the ground. She thought it was a drunken woman, and walked past. But something in the attitude of the woman, who lay sprawled half on the sidewalk, half in the street, compelled her to return. She wished at least to pull her up to the sidewalk so that she would be safe from cars.
The woman was dead. Her eyes were open and staring at Lillian in the feeble light of the street lamp. As she raised the shoulders, the head dropped back with a dull thud against the pavement. Lillian uttered a smothered cry; for a moment, she had thought she had injured the woman. She looked into the face; it was infinitely empty. In perplexity, she looked around; she did not know what to do. A few windows were lighted, and from behind a wide one which was curtained, she heard music. Between the houses, the sky looked very high, and was starless. Someone called out from somewhere. Then Lillian saw a man approaching. She hesitated a moment; then walked rapidly toward him. “Gérard,” she said, astonished and profoundly relieved. “How did you know—?”
“I followed you. That is the privilege of poets on spring evenings.”
Lillian shook her head. “Come, a dead woman is lying there.”
“She is probably drunk. Unconscious.”
“No, she’s dead. I know what the dead look like.” She felt Gérard’s resistance. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” the poet of death said.
“We can’t leave her lying like this.”
“Why not? She’s dead. What happens next is the concern of the police alone. I don’t want to be mixed up in it. You oughtn’t to either. They’ll think we did it to her. Come!”
He tugged at Lillian’s arm. She stood still and gazed into the face that no longer knew anything, and that knew everything that she herself did not know. The dead woman looked frightfully deserted. She had one leg drawn up under her checked skirt. Lillian saw her stockings, her brown shoes, the half-clenched hands, th
e short, dark hair, and a thin chain around her neck.
“Come!” Gérard whispered. “If we stay, there’ll be nothing but trouble. It’s no joke being involved with the police. We can telephone from somewhere. That’s good enough.”
She let herself be drawn away. She knew that Gérard was both right and wrong. He walked so fast that she could scarcely keep up with him. When they reached the better-lighted quay, she saw that he was very pale. “It’s one thing to talk about it and something else again to face it, isn’t it?” she said with bitter mockery. “Where can we telephone? At my hotel?”
“The night porter will overhear us.”
“I can send him away on an errand.”
“All right, then.”
The porter came forward beaming. “He’s in tenth place now, but he’ll—”
He saw Gérard, and lapsed into reproachful silence. “A friend of Clerfayt’s,” Lillian said. “You’re right, we must celebrate now. Would you bring us a bottle of champagne? Where is the telephone?”
The porter pointed to his desk, and went out. “Now,” Lillian said.
Gérard was already looking in the telephone book. “It’s an old book.”
“The police don’t change their numbers.”
In tenth place, Lillian thought. He is still driving and driving, from Brescia to Brescia.
She heard Gérard speaking. The porter came back with glasses and the bottle. The cork popped like a shot; the porter had shaken the bottle too joyfully. Gérard started and stopped speaking. “No, no shot,” he then said into the telephone, and hung up.
“I think you need a drink,” Lillian said. “At the moment, it was all I could think of: to order the champagne; the porter has been waiting all evening for it. I suppose it isn’t a sacrilege.”