“All right, we’ll sit here.”
It was not exactly how he had proposed to pass his first night in Paris.
He wished he hadn’t been such a fool as to take her to the Midnight Mass.
He had not the heart to be unkind to her.
But perhaps there was some intonation in his reply that struck her, for she turned a little to look him in the face.
She gave him once more the smile he had already seen two or three times on her.
It was a queer sort of smile.
It hardly moved the lips; it held no gaiety, but was not devoid of kindliness; there was more irony in it than amusement and it was rare and unwilling, patient and disillusioned.
“This can’t be very amusing for you.
Why don’t you go back to the Serail and leave me here?”
“No, I won’t do that.”
“I don’t mind being alone, you know.
I sometimes come here by myself and sit for hours.
You’ve come to Paris to enjoy yourself.
You’d be a fool not to.”
“If it doesn’t bore you I’d like to sit here with you.”
“Why?”
She gave him on a sudden a disdainful glance.
“Do you look upon yourself as being noble and self-sacrificing?
Or are you sorry for me or only curious?”
Charley could not imagine why she seemed angry with him or why she said these wounding things.
“Why should I feel sorry for you?
Or curious?”
He meant her to understand that she was not the first prostitute he had met in his life and he was not likely to be impressed with a life-story which was probably sordid and in all likelihood untrue.
Lydia stared at him with an expression which to him looked like incredulous surprise.
“What did your friend Simon tell you about me?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you redden when you say that?”
“I didn’t know I reddened,” he smiled.
In fact Simon had told him that she was not a bad romp, and would give him his money’s worth, but that was not the sort of thing he felt inclined to tell her just then.
With her pale face and swollen eyelids, in that poor brown dress and the black felt hat, there was nothing to remind one of the creature, in her blue Turkish trousers, with a naked body, who had had a curious, exotic attractiveness.
It was another person altogether, quiet, respectable, demure, with whom Charley could as little think of going to bed as with one of the junior mistresses at Patsy’s old school.
Lydia relapsed into silence.
She seemed to be sunk in reverie.
When at last she spoke it was as though she were continuing her train of thought rather than addressing him.
“If I cried just now in church it wasn’t for the reason that you thought.
I’ve cried enough for that, heaven knows, but just then it was for something different.
I felt so lonely.
All those people, they have a country, and in that country, homes; to-morrow they’ll spend Christmas Day together, father and mother and children; some of them, like you, went only to hear the music, and some have no faith, but just then, all of them, they were joined together by a common feeling; that ceremony, which they’ve known all their lives, and whose meaning is in their blood, every word spoken, every action of the priests, is familiar to them, and even if they don’t believe with their minds, the awe, the mystery, is in their bones and they believe with their hearts; it is part of the recollections of their childhood, the gardens they played in, the countryside, the streets of the towns.
It binds them together, it makes them one, and some deep instinct tells them that they belong to one another.
But I am a stranger.
I have no country, I have no home, I have no language.
I belong nowhere.
I am outcast.”
She gave a mournful little chuckle.
“I’m a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I’ve read.
I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I’ve read of in books and though I try and try, I can’t see them with my mind’s eye.
I know Moscow from what I’ve seen of it at the cinema.
I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it’s no good, I know that what I see isn’t that at all.
I’m a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French.