The Last of Cheri Read online

  ‘After the next war,’ said Chéri jokingly. ‘Tell me, those two capital letters. . . . Yes, the monogram in little brilliants. . . . It’s not yours, Pal?’

  He pointed at the black bag with the tip of his forefinger, extending it slowly while withdrawing his body, as though the bag were alive.

  ‘Nothing escapes you,’ the Pal said in admiration. ‘You’re quite right. She gave it to me, of course. She said to me: “Such bits of finery are far too frivolous for me nowadays!” She said: “What the devil do you suppose I’d be doing with those mirrors and powder and things, when I’ve a great face like a country policeman’s?” She made me laugh. . . .’

  To stem the flood, Chéri pushed the change from his hundred-franc note towards the Pal. ‘For your taxi, Pal.’

  They went out on to the pavement by the tradesman’s entrance, and Chéri saw from the fainter lamplight that night was coming on.

  ‘Have you not got your motor?’

  ‘My motor? No. I walked; it does me good.’

  ‘Is your wife in the country?’

  ‘No. Her Hospital keeps her in Paris.’

  The Pal nodded her invertebrate hat. ‘I know. She’s a big-hearted woman. Her name’s been put forward for a decoration, I understand from the Baroness.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here, stop that taxi for me, dear boy, the closed one. . . . And Charlotte’s going big guns in her support; she knows people round Clemenceau. It will make up a little for the story about Rita . . . a little, not very much. She’s as black as Sin itself, is Charlotte, my boy.’

  He pushed her into the oven of the taxi, where she sank back and became enveloped in the shadow. She ceased to exist. It was as though he had never met her, now that he heard her voice no longer. He took stock of the night, filling his lungs with the dust-laden air that foretold another scorching day. He pictured, as in a dream, that he would wake up at home, among gardens watered every evening, among the scent of Spanish honeysuckle and the call of birds, resting alongside his wife’s straight hips. . . . But the Pal’s voice rose up from the depths of the taxi: ‘Two hundred and fourteen, Avenue de Villiers! Remember my address, Chéri! And you know that I often dine at the Giraffe, Avenue de Wagram, don’t you, if ever you should want me. . . . You know, if ever you should be looking for me.’

  ‘That’s really the limit,’ thought Chéri, lengthening his step. ‘“If I should ever be looking for her.” I ask you! Next time I come across her, I’ll turn round and walk the other way.’

  Cooled off and calmer, he strode without effort along the quais as far as the Place de l’Alma, and from there took a taxi back to the Avenue Henri-Martin. The eastern sky was already burnished with dull copper-coloured tints, which seemed rather to betoken the setting of some planet than the dawn of a summer day. No clouds streaked the vault of the heavens, but a haze of particles hung heavy and motionless over Paris, and would presently flare up and smoulder with the sombre glow of red-hot metal. As dawn breaks, the dog-days drain great cities and their suburbs of the moist pinks, floral mauves, and dewy blues that suffuse the sky above open country where plant life flourishes in profusion.

  Nothing was stirring in the house when Chéri came to turn the tiny key in the lock. The flagged hall still smelt of the previous evening’s dinner, and the cut branches of syringa, arranged by the armful in white vases tall enough to hide a man, filled the air with unbreathable poison. A stray grey cat slipped past him, stopped dead in the middle of the passage, and coldly inspected the intruder.

  ‘Come here, little clerk of the Courts,’ Chéri called in a low voice. The cat glared at him almost insultingly and did not budge. Chéri remembered that no animal – no dog, horse, or cat – had ever shown him any signs of affection. He could hear, across a span of fifteen years, Aldonza’s raucous voice prophesying: ‘A curse lies on those from whom animals turn away.’ But when the cat, now wide awake, began to play with a small green chestnut, bowling it along with its front paw, Chéri smiled and went on up to his room.

  He found it as dark and blue as a stage night. The dawn penetrated no further than the balcony, bedecked with well trained roses and pelargoniums fastened with raffia. Edmée was asleep, her bare arms and toes peeping out from under a light blanket. She was lying on her side, her head inclined, one finger hooked through her pearls. In the half-light she seemed to be immersed in thought rather than sleep. Her wavy hair strayed over her cheek, and Chéri could hear no sound of her breathing.

  ‘She’s enjoying a peaceful sleep,’ thought Chéri. ‘She’s dreaming of Doctor Arnaud, or the Legion of Honour, or Royal Dutch shares. She’s pretty. How pretty she is! . . . “Don’t you worry, only another two or three hours, and you’ll go to find your Doctor Arnaud. That’s not so bad, is it? You’ll meet again in the Avenue de l’Italia, in your beloved joint with its stink of carbolic. You’ll answer ‘Yes, Doctor; No, Doctor,’ like a good little girl. You’ll both of you put on really serious expressions; you’ll jiggle with thermometers – ninety-nine point six, a hundred and two point four – and he’ll take your small carbolicky paw in his great coal-tarry mitt. You’re lucky, my girl, to have a romance in your life! Don’t worry. I shan’t deprive you of it. . . .” I wouldn’t mind, myself. . . .’

  All of a sudden Edmée woke up with such a start that Chéri caught his breath, as though rudely interrupted in the middle of a sentence.

  ‘It’s you! It’s you! Why, it is you after all.’

  ‘If you were expecting someone else, I offer my apologies,’ said Chéri, smiling at her.

  ‘That’s very clever. . . .’ She sat up in bed and tossed back her hair. ‘What time is it? Are you getting up? Oh no, I see you’ve not been to bed yet. . . . You’ve just come in. . . . Oh, Fred! What have you been up to this time?’

  ‘“This time” is a compliment. . . . If you only knew what I’ve been doing. . . .’

  She was no longer at the stage where, hands over her ears, she besought him, ‘No, no! say nothing! Don’t tell me!’ But, faster than his wife, Chéri was leaving behind that childishly malicious period when, amidst floods of tears and stormy scenes which ended by her throwing herself into his arms in the early hours of the morning, he would draw her down with him into the deep sleep of reconciled antagonists. No more little games of that sort. . . . No more betrayals. . . . Nothing, now, but this enforced and unavowable chastity.

  He chucked his dusty shoes to the other end of the room, and sat down on the soft lace-frilled sheets, offering his wife a pallid face accustomed to dissemble everything except his will to dissemble. ‘Smell me!’ he said. ‘Come on! I’ve been drinking whisky.’

  She brought her charming mouth to his, putting a hand on her husband’s shoulder. ‘Whisky . . .’ she repeated wonderingly. ‘Whisky . . . why?’

  A less sophisticated woman would have asked ‘With whom?’ and her cunning did not pass unnoticed. Chéri showed that two could play at that game by answering, ‘With an old pal. Do you want to hear the whole truth?’

  She smiled, now caught in the dawning light which, with growing boldness, touched the edge of the bed, the looking-glass, a picture-frame, and then the golden scales of a fish swimming round and round in a crystal bowl.

  ‘No, Fred, not the whole truth. Only a half-veiled truth, suitable for the small hours.’ At the same time, her thoughts were busy. She was certain – or nearly so – that Chéri had not been drawn away from her either by love or by lust. She let her acquiescent body fall helplessly into his arms, yet he felt on his shoulder a thin, hard hand, unrelaxed in its guarded prudence.

  ‘The truth is’, he went on, ‘that I don’t know her name. But I gave her . . . wait a moment . . . I gave her eighty-three francs.’

  ‘Just like that, all at once! The first time you met her? It’s princely!’

  She pretended to yawn, and slipped softly back into the depths of the bed, as though not expecting an answer. He gave her a moment’s pity; then a brilliant horizontal ray brought into
sharper relief the almost naked body lying beside him, and his pity vanished.

  ‘She’s . . . she has kept her good looks. It’s not fair.’

  She lay back, her lips parted, looking at him through half-closed eyes. He saw a gleam of the candid, calculating, scarcely feminine expression that a woman bestows on the man who is going to pleasure her, and it shocked his unavowable chastity. From his superior position he returned this look with another – the uncommunicative, enigmatic look of the man who prefers to abstain. Not wishing to move away, he simply looked towards the golden daylight, the freshness of the watered garden, and the blackbirds, weaving liquid sequences of sound round the dry incessant chirps of the sparrows. Edmée could see signs of emaciation and prolonged fatigue on his features. His cheeks were blue with a day’s growth of beard. She noticed that his fine hands were not clean, that his finger-nails had not been near soap and water since the previous evening, and that the dark lines which accentuated the hollows under his eyes were now spreading, in the shape of crow’s feet, towards his nose. This handsome young man – she decided – without collar or shoes, looked ravaged, as if he had had to spend a night in prison. Without losing his looks, he had shrunk in accordance with some mysterious scaling down, and this enabled her to regain the upper hand. She no longer invited him to join her, sat up in bed, and put a hand on his forehead.

  ‘Ill?’

  Slowly he let his attention wander back from the garden to his wife.

  ‘What? . . . No, no, nothing’s wrong with me, except I’m sleepy. So sleepy that I can hardly bring myself to go to bed – if you know what I mean. . . .’

  He smiled, showing dry gums and lips colourless on the insides. But, above all, this smile betrayed a sadness that sought no remedy, modest as a poor man’s suffering. Edmée was on the point of questioning him categorically, but then thought better of it.

  ‘Get into bed,’ she ordered, making room for him.

  ‘Bed? It’s water I need. I feel so filthy, it just isn’t true.’

  He just had the strength to lift up a water-bottle, take a gulp from the neck, then throw off his coat, before he fell back like a log on the bed, and lay there without moving again, drained by sleep.

  For some little time Edmée gazed at the half-stripped stranger lying like a drugged man beside her. Her watchful eye wandered from bluish lips to hollowed eyes, from outflung hand to forehead sealed upon a single secret. She summoned her self-control and composed her features, as though afraid the sleeper might take her by surprise. She got out of bed softly, and, before shutting out the dazzling sunlight, drew a silk counterpane to hide the outstretched untidy body looking like a burglar who had been knocked out. She arranged this so as to give the beautiful rigid features their full splendour, carefully pulling it down over the drooping hand with a slight qualm of pious disgust, as though hiding a weapon that perhaps had killed.

  He never twitched a muscle – having retired for a few moments within an impregnable fastness. In any case, Edmée’s hospital training had given her fingers a professional touch, which, if not exactly gentle, was competent to go straight to the required spot without touching or in any way affecting the surrounding area. She did not get back into bed; but, sitting half-naked, enjoyed the unexpected freshness of the hour when the sun rouses the winds. The long curtains stirred, as if breathing and, dependent on the breeze, stippled Chéri’s sleep with fitful flecks of dark blue.

  As she gazed at him, Edmée was not thinking of the wounded, or of the dead, whose peasant hands she had joined together upon coarse cotton sheets. No invalid in the grip of a nightmare, not one among the dead, had ever resembled Chéri: sleep, silence, and repose made him magnificently inhuman.

  Extreme beauty arouses no sympathy. It is not the prerogative of any one country. Time’s finger had touched Chéri only to make him more austere. The mind – whose task it is to curb the splendour of mankind while degrading it piecemeal – respected Chéri as an admirable temple dedicated to instinct. What could avail the Machiavellian deceit, the ardour, and the cunning self-sacrifice imposed by love, against this inviolable standard-bearer of light and his untutored majesty?

  Patient and, on occasion, subtle as she was, it never occurred to Edmée that the feminine appetite for possession tends to emasculate every living conquest, and can reduce a magnificent but inferior male to the status of a courtesan. Her lower-middle-class wisdom made her determined not to relinquish the gains – money, ease, domestic tyranny, marriage – acquired in so few years and rendered doubly attractive by the war.

  She gazed at the limp, worn-out, almost empty-looking body. ‘That’s Chéri,’ she said to herself; ‘yes, that’s Chéri all right . . . That’s how small a thing he is!’ She shrugged a shoulder and added: ‘That’s what he’s reduced to, this wonderful Chéri of theirs . . .’ doing her best to induce contempt for the man lying thus supine. She called up memories of rapturous nights, of languid early mornings bathed in sunlight and pleasure, and, as a result – since he had progressively grown to disdain her – she saw fit to pay but coldly vindictive homage to this body so sumptuously laid out under the pall of flowered silk and the refreshing wing of the curtains. She put one hand on the small, pointed breast set low on her slender body, and squeezed it like a pulpy fruit, as if calling this most tempting allurement of her young body to witness the injustice of his desertion. ‘What Chéri himself needs is doubtless something else. What he needs is . . .’

  But vain were her attempts to put her scorn into words. Even a woman loses the desire and the ability to despise a man who suffers in silence and alone.

  All of a sudden, Edmée felt satiated with the spectacle: the shadows thrown by the curtains, the pallor of the sleeper, and the white bed helped to invest it with the romantic colouring of death and the nether world. She jumped to her feet, strong and ready to face this world, but determined to avoid any emotional attack upon the traitor lying on the disordered bed, the absentee seeking refuge in sleep, silent, ailing, and repulsive. She was neither irritated nor unhappy. Her heart would beat more feverishly in her breast, the blood mount more quickly to her pearl-pale cheeks, only at the thought of the healthy red-haired man whom she called ‘dear master’ or ‘chief’ in tones of serious playfulness. Arnaud’s thick gentle hands; his laugh; the points of light that sunshine or the lamp in the operating theatre caused to twinkle on his red moustache; his very coat – the white surgery coat he wore and even took off in the hospital, just like an intimate garment that never passes beyond the bedroom door. . . . Edmée sprang up as though for a dance.

  ‘That, oh yes, that’s my life!’ She gave a toss of the head that sent her hair flying out like a horse’s mane, and went into the bathroom without turning round.

  UNIMAGINATIVE IN STYLE, and in its very ordinary proportions, the dining-room made no pretence to luxury except in the panels of yellow stuff starred with purple and green. The grey and white stucco of the surrounding walls deflected too much light on the guests, deprived already of all shade by the merciless glare of the top lighting.

  A galaxy of crystal sequins shimmered with every movement of Edmée’s dress. For the family dinner, Madame Peloux was still wearing her tailor-made with leather buttons, and Camille de La Berche her nurse’s veil, under the cowl of which she bore a striking resemblance to Dante, only far hairier. Because it was so hot, the women spoke little: so did Chéri, because it was his habit. A warm bath followed by a cold shower had triumphed over his fatigue; but the powerful light, ricocheting upon his cheeks, accentuated their cavities, and he kept his eyes lowered, to allow the shadow from his eyebrows to fall directly over the lids.

  ‘Tonight, Chéri doesn’t look a day over sixteen,’ boomed the deep bass of the Baroness out of the blue.

  No one took up her remark, and Chéri acknowledged it with a slight bow.

  ‘Not for a long time’, the Baroness continued, ‘have I seen the oval of his face so slender.’

  Edmée frowned imperceptibly. ‘
I have. During the war, of course.’

  ‘That’s true, that’s true,’ piped Charlotte Peloux in shrill agreement. ‘Heavens! how worn out he looked in 1916, at Vésoul! Edmée, my dear child,’ she went on in the same breath, ‘I’ve seen you-know-who today, and everything is going along very nicely. . . .’

  Edmée blushed in a docile, unbecoming manner, and Chéri raised his eyes. ‘You’ve seen who? And what’s going along nicely?’

  ‘Trousellier’s pension – my little soldier who’s had his right arm off. He left the Hospital on June the twentieth. Your mother’s taking up his case at the War Office.’

  She had not hesitated for words, and she let her calm golden gaze rest on Chéri: yet he knew she was lying.

  ‘It’s a question of whether he’ll get his red riband. After all, poor boy, it’s certainly his turn. . . .’

  She was lying to him in front of two friends who knew that she was lying. ‘Why don’t I pick up the water-bottle and crash it down in the middle of them?’ But he made no movement. What strength of feeling would have given him the impetus to brace his body and direct his hand?

  ‘Abzac is leaving us in a week’s time,’ began Madame de La Berche.

  ‘That’s not certain,’ Edmée took her up with an air of knowing better. ‘Doctor Arnaud isn’t at all satisfied that he should be allowed to go off like that on his new leg. You can just see the man, liable to do any sort of silly thing, and always with the possibility of gangrene. Doctor Arnaud knows only too well that it was exactly that sort of thing, all through the war. . . .’

  Chéri looked at her, and she stopped abruptly in the middle of her pointless sentence. She was fanning herself with a rose on a leafy stalk. She waved away a dish which she was offered, and put her elbows on the table. In her white dress and bare shoulders, even when sitting still, she was not exempt from a secret contentment, a self-satisfaction, which revealed her true nature. Something outrageous radiated from her soft outlines. Some tell-tale glow betrayed the woman bent on ‘arriving’, who up till the present had met only with success.