I
By February Stephen’s book was rewritten and in the hands of her publisher in England. This gave her the peaceful, yet exhilarated feeling that comes when a writer has given of his best and knows that that best is not unworthy. With a sigh of relief she metaphorically stretched, rubbed her eyes and started to look about her. She was in the mood that comes as a reaction from strain, and was glad enough of amusement; moreover the spring was again in the air, the year had turned, there were sudden bright days when the sun brought a few hours of warmth to Paris.
They were now no longer devoid of friends, no longer solely dependent upon Brockett on the one hand, and Mademoiselle Duphot on the other; Stephen’s telephone would ring pretty often. There was now always somewhere for Mary to go; always people who were anxious to see her and Stephen, people with whom one got intimate quickly and was thus saved a lot of unnecessary trouble. Of them all, however, it was Barbara and Jamie for whom Mary developed a real affection; she and Barbara had formed a harmless alliance which at times was even a little pathetic. The one talking of Jamie, the other of Stephen, they would put their young heads together very gravely. “Do you find Jamie goes off her food when she’s working?” “Do you find that Stephen sleeps badly? Is she careless of her health? Jamie’s awfully worrying sometimes.”
Or perhaps they would be in a more flippant mood and would sit and whisper together, laughing; making tender fun of the creatures they loved, as women have been much inclined to do ever since that rib was demanded of Adam. Then Jamie and Stephen would pretend to feel aggrieved, would pretend that they also must hang together, must be on their guard against feminine intrigues. Oh, yes, the whole business was rather pathetic.
Jamie and her Barbara were starvation-poor, so poor that a square meal came as a godsend. Stephen would feel ashamed to be rich, and, like Mary, was always anxious to feed them. Being idle at the moment, Stephen would insist upon frequently taking them out to dinner, and then she would order expensive viands—copper-green oysters straight from the Marennes, caviar and other such costly things, to be followed by even more sumptuous dishes—and since they went short on most days in the week, these stomachic debauches would frequently upset them. Two glasses of wine would cause Jamie to flush, for her head had never been of the strongest, nor was it accustomed to such golden nectar. Her principal beverage was crème-de-menthe because it kept out the cold in the winter, and because, being pepperminty and sweet, it reminded her of the bull’s-eyes at Beedles.
They were not very easy to help, these two, for Jamie, pride-galled, was exceedingly touchy. She would never accept gifts of money or clothes, and was struggling to pay off the debt to her master. Even food gave offence unless it was shared by the donors, which though very praiseworthy was foolish. However, there it was, one just had to take her or leave her, there was no compromising with Jamie.
After dinner they would drift back to Jamie’s abode, a studio in the old Rue Visconti. They would climb innumerable dirty stone stairs to the top of what had once been a fine house but was now let off to such poor rats as Jamie. The concierge, an unsympathetic woman, long soured by the empty pockets of students, would peer out at them from her dark ground floor kennel, with sceptical eyes.
“Bon soir, Madame Lambert.”
“Bon soir, mesdames,” she would growl impolitely.
Jamie’s studio was large, bare, and swept by draughts. The stove was too small and at times it smelt vilely. The distempered grey walls were a mass of stains, for whenever it hailed or rained or snowed the windows and skylight would always start dripping. The furniture consisted of a few shaky chairs, a table, a divan and a hired grand piano. Nearly everyone seated themselves on the floor, robbing the divan of its moth-eaten cushions. From the studio there led off a tiny room with an eye-shaped window that would not open. In this room had been placed a narrow camp-bed to which Jamie retired when she felt extra sleepless. For the rest, there was a sink with a leaky tap; a cupboard in which they kept crème-de-menthe, what remnants of food they possessed at the moment, Jamie’s carpet slippers and blue jean jacket—minus which she could never compose a note—and the pail, cloths and brushes with which Barbara endeavoured to keep down the accumulating dirt and confusion. For Jamie with her tow-coloured head in the clouds, was not only shortsighted but intensely untidy. Dust meant little to her since she seldom saw it, while neatness was completely left out of her makeup; considering how limited were her possessions, the chaos they produced was truly amazing. Barbara would sigh and would quite often scold—when she scolded she reminded one of a wren who was struggling to discipline a large cuckoo.
“Jamie, your dirty shirt, give it to me—leaving it there on the piano, whatever!” Or, “Jamie, come here and look at your hairbrush; if you haven’t gone and put it next-door to the butter!”
Then Jamie would peer with her strained, red-rimmed eyes and would grumble: “Oh, leave me in peace, do, lassie!”
But when Barbara laughed, as she must do quite often at the outrageous habits of the great loose-limbed creature, why then these days she would usually cough, and when Barbara started to cough she coughed badly. They had seen a doctor who had spoken about lungs and had shaken his head; not strong, he had told them. But neither of them had quite understood, for their French had remained very embryonic, and they could not afford the smart English doctor. All the same when Barbara coughed Jamie sweated, and her fear would produce an acute irritation.
“Here, drink this water! Don’t sit there doing nothing but rack yourself to bits, it gets on my nerves. Go and order another bottle of that mixture. God, how can I work if you will go on coughing!” She would slouch to the piano and play mighty chords, pressing down the loud pedal to drown that coughing. But when it had subsided she would feel deep remorse. “Oh, Barbara, you’re so little—forgive me. It’s all my fault for bringing you out here, you’re not strong enough for this damnable life, you don’t get the right food, or anything proper.”
In the end it would be Barbara who must console. “We’ll be rich some day when you’ve finished your opera—anyhow my cough isn’t dangerous, Jamie.”
Sometimes Jamie’s music would go all wrong, the opera would blankly refuse to get written. At the Conservatoire she would be very stupid, and when she got home she would be very silent, pushing her supper away with a frown, because coming upstairs she had heard that cough. Then Barbara would feel even more tired and weak than before, but would hide her weakness from Jamie. After supper they would undress in front of the stove if the weather was cold, would undress without speaking. Barbara could get out of her clothes quite neatly in no time, but Jamie must always dawdle, dropping first this and then that on the floor, or pausing to fill her little black pipe and to light it before putting on her pyjamas.
Barbara would fall on her knees by the divan and would start to say prayers like a child, very simply. “Our Father,” she would say, and other prayers too, which always ended in: “Please God, bless Jamie.” For believing in Jamie she must needs believe in God, and because she loved Jamie she must love God also—it had long been like this, ever since they were children. But sometimes she would shiver in her prim cotton nightgown, so that Jamie, grown anxious, would speak to her sharply:
“Oh, stop praying, do. You and all your prayers! Are you daft to kneel there when the room’s fairly freezing? That’s how you catch cold; now tonight you’ll cough!”
But Barbara would not so much as turn round; she would calmly and earnestly go on with her praying. Her neck would look thin against the thick plait which hung neatly down between her bent shoulders; and the hands that covered her face would look thin—thin and transparent like the hands of a consumptive. Fuming inwardly, Jamie would stump off to bed in the tiny room with its eye-shaped window, and there she herself must mutter a prayer, especially if she heard Barbara coughing.
At times Jamie gave way to deep depression, hating the beautiful city of her exile. Homesick unto death she would suddenly feel for the dour little Highland village of Beedles. More even than for its dull bricks and mortar would she long for its dull and respectable spirit, for the sense of security common to Sabbaths, for the kirk with its dull and respectable people. She would think with a tenderness bred by forced absence of the greengrocer’s shop that stood on the corner, where they sold, side by side with the cabbages and onions, little neatly tied bunches of Scottish heather, little earthenware jars of opaque heather honey. She would think of the vast, stretching, windy moorlands; of the smell of the soil after rain in summer; of the piper with his weather-stained, agile fingers, of the wail of his sorrowful, outlandish music; of Barbara as she had been in the days when they strolled side by side down the narrow high street. And then she would sit with her head in her hands, hating the sound and the smell of Paris, hating the sceptical eyes of the concierge, hating the bare and unhomely studio. Tears would well up from heaven alone knew what abyss of half-understood desolation, and would go splashing down upon her tweed skirt, or trickling back along her red wrists until they had wetted her frayed flannel wristbands. Coming home with their evening meal in a bag, this was how Barbara must sometimes find her.