One Saturday night, when there was nothing else to do, he went up to Montmartre, and walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, past the grotesque absurdities of the cabarets that are set there for the delectation of foreign and provincial strangers: cabarets that mock at death and heaven and hell with all the vulgarity and coarseness that exists side by side with the love of beauty, art and culture in Paris.
For a franc you could watch the old illusion of a shrouded man turning to a grisly skeleton in his narrow coffin; or you could see a diverting burlesque of the celestial realms, and observe how sinners were burnt in a canvas hell with artificial flames. Humphrey had seen all these during his first week in Paris: he had laughed, but afterwards he had been ashamed of his laughter. They were a little degrading....
He passed them by to-night, in spite of the enticing blandishments of the mock mute, the angel and the devil by the doors of their haunts. He wandered aimlessly along this Boulevard, where women crossed his path, looking very picturesque, without any covering to their heads, shawls across their shoulders and red aprons down to the fringe of their short skirts. There was something savage and primitive about these women: they lacked the frankness and gaiety of the coster-girl in London; they were beautiful, with an evil and cruel beauty. Vicious-looking men slouched from the shadows. Their looks could not conceal the knives in their pockets. They were as rats in the night, creeping from pavement to pavement, preying on humanity.
[300]
The door of a café chantant opened, as Humphrey came abreast with it, and the sound of a jingling chorus, played on a discordant piano, arrested his steps. The man who was coming out, thinking that Humphrey was about to enter, held the door open for him politely. Something impelled Humphrey forward.
He went inside.
The room was heavy with tobacco smoke; it floated in thin clouds about the lights and drifted here and there in pale spirals as it was blown from the lips of the smokers. His vision was blurred by the smoke at first, and, as he stood there blinking and self-conscious, it was as though he had intruded into some private and intimate gathering. It seemed that every one in the room was staring at him. The impression only lasted a moment. He perceived a vacant chair by a table and sat down, with the bearing of one to whom the place was familiar.
All around him the men and women were sitting. There was an air of sex-comradeship that, in spite of its frankness, was neither indecent nor blatant. The people were behaving in the most natural way in the world. Sometimes a woman nestled close to a man and their hands interlaced; sometimes a man sat with his arm round the waist of a girl. Mild liquids were before them—the light beer of France, little glasses of cherries soaked in brandy, glasses of white and red wine. Their eyes were set towards the small stage at the end of the room, a narrow platform framed in crudely-painted canvas, representing trees and foliage; while at the back there was a drop-scene that showed a forest as an early Japanese artist might have drawn it, with vast distances and a nursery contempt for perspective.
His eye wandered to the walls painted with scroll-work and deformed cupids and panels of nude women, so badly done that they appealed more to the sense of humour than to the sexual. The pictures on the walls[301] seemed to leave the men and women untouched; they concentrated all their attention on the entertainment. The only person in the place who showed any sign of boredom was the gendarme who sat by the door, the State's hostage to its conscience. Nothing, said the State, in effect, can be indecent if one of our gendarmes is there. This was not one of the cabarets where the poet-singers of Montmartre chant, with melancholy face, their witty doggerel or their fragrant pastorals; where people came to hear the veiled obscenities of political satire or allusions to passing events; this was a second-rate affair, a tingel-tangel—a species of family music-hall.
A waiter in an alpaca jacket, a stained apron wound skirt-wise round his trousers, approached Humphrey with an inquiring lift of his eyebrows. He removed empty glasses dexterously with one hand and slopped a cloth over the table with the other.
"M'sieu, desire...?"
"Un fin," answered Humphrey.
The waiter emitted an explosive Bon and threaded his way through the labyrinth of chairs to a high wooden counter, where a fat man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled back to his elbow, stood sentinel over rows of coloured bottles. The light shone on green and red liqueurs, on pale amber and dark brown bottles placed on glass shelves against a looking-glass background, that reflected the bullet shape of the patron's close-cropped head.
Meanwhile the pianist had finished his interlude, and there was a burst of applause as a woman appeared on the stage. She wore an amazing hat of orange and white silk, in which feathers were the most insistent feature. There was something extraordinarily bold and flaunting in her presence. Her neck and shoulders and bosom were bare to the low cut of her bodice, and the cruel light showed the powder that she had scattered over her throat[302] and shoulders to make them white and enticing; it showed the red paint on the lips and the rouge on the cheeks, and the black on her eyelashes and eyebrows. The crude touches of obvious artifice destroyed her beauty. Her waist was compressed into a painful smallness, and her skirt was flounced and reached only to the knees.
She sang a song that had something to do with a soldier's life. "Tell me, soldier," she sang, "what do you think of in battle? Do you think of the glory of the Fatherland and the splendour of dying for France?" And the soldier answers: "I think only of a farm in Avignon, and a maiden whose lips I used to kiss on the old bridge; I think only of my old mother and how she will embrace me when I come home."
When she sang the simple song, though her voice was false, and her gestures stereotyped, the rouge and the powder and the paint were forgotten for a moment. She was one of those unconscious artists belonging to a people who have art woven into the warp and woof of their daily life.
The audience took up the chorus. She nodded to them with an audacious smile. The pianist, with his cigarette stub hanging from his lips, under cover of the volume of voices, forsook the treble for a moment, and reached out with his hand for a glass of beer that rested above the piano.
It was the strange, fumbling motion of his hand that caught Humphrey's eye, trained to observe such details. He looked closer, and saw that the pianist's eyes were closed, and the lashes were withered where they met the cheek. He was blind; he never saw the faces and figures of the women who sang, he only heard the voices; he could see nothing that was harsh and cruel. And the picture of the blind pianist at the side of the garish stage, improvising little runs and trills and spinning[303] a web of melody night after night, stirred Humphrey with an odd emotion.
There was a pause. The door opened and closed as people came and went. Humphrey sipped at the brandy; the fiery taste of it made his palate and throat smart. The price of the entertainment was one franc, including a drink.
Suddenly the pianist struck up a well-known air. A slim girl, in the costume of the district, slouched on to the stage, her hands thrust into the pockets of her apron. Her hair was bundled together in careless heaps of yellow, her eyes were pale blue and almost almond-shaped, her features finely moulded, with a queer distinction of their own. And when she took one hand out of her apron pocket, he saw that the fingers were long and exquisitely tapered, and tipped with pink, beautiful nails that shone in the light. Those finger-nails betrayed her. They were not in keeping with the part.
She started singing, walking the small stage with a swaying motion of her body; her young form was lithe and graceful; her movements tigrine. And as she sang her lilting chorus, her pale eyes gazed from their narrow slits at Humphrey, not boldly or coquettishly, but with an indeterminate appeal, as though she felt ashamed of her song.
"Quand je danse avec mon grand frisé
Il a l'air de m'enlacer
Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête!
'Y a pas chose—'suis sa chose à lui
'Y a pas mal—Quoi? C'est mon mari
Car moi, je l'aime
J'aime mon grand frisé."
The audience sang the swinging chorus, and she moved sinuously to and fro with the rhythm of it. Humphrey sat there, and he seemed to lose consciousness[304] of all the other people in the room—the smell of the smoke, and the jingle of the piano, and the ill-painted pictures on the walls faded away from him; all his senses seemed to merge and concentrate on the enjoyment of this moment. She was singing on the stage for him, her narrow eyes never left him.
And her song was a p?an in praise of the brute in man.
She acted her song. Her face was radiant with the joy of being possessed, and her eyes shone as she abandoned herself to the words:
"Quand je danse avec le grand frisé
Il a l'air de m'enlacer...."
Then her wonderful hands with their glinting finger-nails went up to her head, and she half-closed her eyes, as though she were swooning:
"Je perds la tête...."
Now her eyes were opened, and they glared wildly, and her lips trembled, and her slim body quivered with animal hunger:
"'Suis comme une bête."
And now, she smiled, and pride was on her face; one hand rested on her hip, and she swaggered up the stage, as the words fitted into the opening lilt:
"'Y pas chose—suis sa chose à lui
'Y pas mal—Quoi? C'est mon mari...."
Her face became at once miraculously tender. She expressed great and overpowering love—a love so strong that it swept everything before it—a love that was without restraint, passionate, fierce and unquenchable. Her arms were outstretched. Her dark blouse, opened at the neck, revealed her white throat throbbing with her song:
"Car moi, je l'aime
J'aime mon grand frisé."
[305]
And when she sang "Je l'aime," she invested the words with passion and renunciation.
They clamoured for another verse, crying "Bis ... Bis," in throaty tones, but she only came on to bow to them, and walk off again with that swaying stride.
"Eh, bien!" said a voice at Humphrey's elbow, "she is very good, our little Desirée, hein?"
He turned half round in his chair. At first he did not recognize the immaculately clothed young man, with the fair, long hair, who smiled at him, and then he recollected that they had met in the office of Le Parisien.
"M. Charnac, isn't it?" Humphrey asked. "I didn't know you at once.... Yes, she's very good. What's her name?"
"Desirée Lebeau," Charnac answered. He looked at Humphrey again, still smiling.
"Do you often come here?" he asked.
"This is the first time.... I was wandering about.... I just dropped in."
Humphrey noticed that Charnac was not alone. A pretty girl dressed becomingly in black, with a touch of red about her neck, sat by his side.
"Allow me to present a friend, Margot," Charnac said to the girl. "He is an Englishman—a journalist," he added. And to Humphrey he said:
"Mlle. Margot Lebeau. She is the sister of our little Desirée."
"M'sieu est Anglais," said the dark-haired girl in a piping voice. "Ah! que ?a doit être interessant d'être Anglais."